Archive

Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren’t a Good Defense.

From the New York Times:

The best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months.

Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember. And holding onto it forever.

I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.

F.C.C. Vote Sets Precedent on Unfettered Web Usage

From the New York Times:

The Federal Communications Commission formally voted Friday to uphold the complaint against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, saying that it had illegally inhibited users of its high-speed Internet service from using popular file-sharing software. The decision, which imposes no fine, requires Comcast to end such blocking this year.

Kevin J. Martin, the commission’s chairman, said the order was meant to set a precedent that Internet providers, and indeed all communications companies, could not keep customers from using their networks the way they see fit unless there is a good reason.

FormatFactory Kicks Media Conversion

From Download Squad:

What could be better than a program that will convert audio, video, and image files from and to just about any format you can think of? How about one that does it all batch-style with minimal clicking? FormatFactory doesn’t care what files you want to swap in what order, just feed it your sources and watch it go to work. Unlike a lot of similar apps, this one doesn’t limit you to only video or audio, or even to one file at a time.Dump in as much as you want of whatever you want, and FormatFactory will do all the heavy lifting. It even supports the iPhone and PSP, and 3GP as well - making it a great way to cram multiformat goodness onto your favorite portable player.

This posting is from almost a month ago, and I finally got around to trying it last night. It’s great! It converted a video for me in just a few seconds. I also tried a WAV to MP3 converstion and it only took a few seconds as well.

None of the download links on the site itself worked, so I did a search for the program and found it easily.

Drivers Update Software by RadarSync

The latest issue of Windows Secrets newsletter had some information about driver update software. Several paid products were mentioned, but RadarSync has a free version. I’ve tried it and it seems to work well enough. There isn’t much to say about it other than it determines what hardware you have, the current driver version, and it then checks to see if there are updated drivers. I ran it on my desktop and laptop, and it did find drivers that were not the most current.

Discovering How Greeks Computed in 100 B.C.

From the New York Times:

After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

Apple’s Culture of Secrecy

From the New York Times:

“No one wants to die,” said Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

It was a little over three years ago that Mr. Jobs spoke those existential words, in a commencement address at Stanford. His thoughts about death came during a portion of his speech in which he publicly discussed — for the one and only time, so far as I can tell — his brush with pancreatic cancer.

Fibbing easier through e-mail

From the Globe and Mail (Report on Business):

Have you ever lied in an e-mail?

Honestly, you’re not alone. A U.S. study released Thursday shows e-mail is much more conducive to telling falsehoods than using old-fashioned pen and paper. Moreover, people feel more justified in doing it.

The findings challenge the notion that e-mails are just the same as other written communication, the study’s authors said.

The results “illustrate that traditional pen-and-paper communication is indeed different from e-mail in the way it influences people’s behaviours, even though both [are] text only,” said Charles Naquin of DePaul University, Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University, and Liuba Belkin of Lehigh University.

Previous research has found e-mails are associated with unseemly behaviour such as lower levels of trust, negative attitudes and “flaming” – sending rude messages. This study suggests a greater propensity to lie can be added to that list.

Birth of a Standard: The Intel 8086 Microprocessor

From PCWorld.ca:

The release of Intel’s 8086 microprocessor in 1978 was a watershed moment for personal computing. The DNA of that chip is likely at the center of whatever computer–Windows, Mac, or Linux–you’re using to read this, and it helped transform Intel from merely one of many chip companies to the world’s largest.

Waterford Game & Activities

The Waterford Press has a lot of activities you can print out for the kids to do. The site isn’t very fancy, but there are probably over 100 PDFs that you can print that have word searches, name scrambles, quizzes, and more.

A Book With 90,000 Authors

From the New York Times:

Among the unlikelier announcements made at Wikipedia’s conference in Alexandria, Egypt, was the bold claim on Friday that the online encyclopedia was about to make history in print publishing: creating the book with the most credited individual authors ever — approximately 90,000.

The book with so many authors is the product of an unusual alliance – a single-volume encyclopedia produced by the German publisher Bertelsmann from the 25,000 most popular articles on German Wikipedia. The volume will have very short articles, no more than a few paragraphs at most, and include photos and illustrations.