Fridays are customarily slow news days and the weekends aren’t all that promising for interesting reads as well. Here are some of my favorite links over the past week which you may have missed.
The Onion Beats Investigative Journalism On Google News
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/03/the-onion-beats-investigative-journalism-on-google-news/
Avoiding Apple’s Ivory Tower
You don’t have to shell out big bucks for a back-to-school computer.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/26/apple-dell-fujitsu-technology-college-money-builder-09-laptops.html?feed=rss_technology
Photos: How the Wright brothers landed an Army deal
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10001413-1.html?tag=mncol
NFL bans tweeting before, during, after games
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10322904-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
How to Use Windows XP’s Computer Management Tool
http://pcsplace.com/windows-xp/how-to-use-windows-xps-computer-management-tool/
America, a nation obsessed with tech
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10332910-235.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
By Jin Nan Goto
I spent some time today with my newly upgraded Mac Mini. I installed Snow Leopard and as I was setting up file sharing with my Windows PCs, I saw something that I found quite amusing. Showing that people at Apple have a wicked sense of humor, the Icon representing a “PC Server” (in this case it was my Laptop running the Windows 7 RC) showed a distinctive and quite familiar sight for a a PC user. You can see for yourself below.
Now apparently this has been around for quite some time, but since I’m a relatively new Mac user (having left Apple for Windows 95 and being an exclusive PC user until a little less than a year ago. And using Windows 95 I certainly encountered my fair share of blue screens.) this was the first time I had noticed it and I’m surprised how many times I pulled up this screen and never noticed it. It made me smile and shake my head a little.
By Jin Nan Goto
The difficulty with choosing a strong, secure password is remembering that password in the future. Many people overcome the difficulty and inconvenience of remembering by choosing short and easy passwords. It’s not all that surprising that the most commonly used passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’. Other bad passwords include simple patterns ‘qwerty’, names ‘michael’, common words ‘monkey’ and sports team names ‘redskins’. Before choosing a password you may want to consider checking the list linked below to make sure your password is not one of the “500 worst passwords”. Note: some people think they are very clever when picking crude and inappropriate words as their bad passwords, so don’t follow the link if you are offended by that kind of language.
http://www.whatsmypass.com/category/password-info
The second thing people do to overcome the inconvenience of remembering long passwords is to reuse the password for multiple sites. If your password is compromised on one site, then it is compromised on every other site the password is used. One of the key vulnerablilties in the recent twitter hack was a actually not a “hack” but a Twitter employee who reused their password.
The Solution:
“It’s ok to write down your passwords”. While you can simply keep a text file with all your passwords on your computer, there is also software that can remember those super-strong passwords for you. They range from the open source keepass (http://keepass.info/) to commercial solutions such as RoboForm (http://www.roboform.com/) and every modern browser will offer to remember passwords.
