Cell phone tracking

How do you feel about this? From an NYTimes article, Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You:

Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?

Read more about privacy

Fat man

I was rifling through the statistics for this blog recently, and noticed that this site ranks highly for Google Images searches of “fat man“. The image responsible (credit: Yuri Tand), which I posted adjacent to a story about how some big-name antivirus products are bloated and unruly, is currently ranked fourth third on Google:

Fat man staring at skinny man on bench

Unfortunately, the photo above is still ranked less highly for fat man searches than this gem (as well as a couple other, less charming photos):

Fat man on beach

I realize that the fat man term is a highly competitive one, but here’s hoping this site overtakes the current forerunners!

31 October 2007 update: Defending the Kingdom is now #2 on Google searches for “fat man”. I’m very proud.

Read more about Uncategorized

Diagonal passwords

picture of computer keyboard

If you’ve read about passwords to avoid and how to make great passwords, you’re probably pretty secure password-wise.

The gist of both of those posts was this: good passwords appear to be random from the perspective of a guessor, and bad passwords are anything but random (your name, your dog’s name, numbers from you driver’s licence, etc.).

Are diagonally-typed passwords good?

What about typing diagonally on one’s keyboard? Does that constitute a good password?

It sure can look like it. Here’s an example of an eight-character password typed diagonally: 1qsx4rgb. Most human observers would fail to see much of a pattern in that password. In other words, it looks random. But it’s not.

Password guesser’s know every trick in the book. It’s not that hard for them to design a program that tries out some (or all) of the more common diagonally-typed passwords. Keep away from them.

Read more about passwords