Go Team Pandy!

The webhost I use is Dreamhost. Part of the reason I like them so much is that the people that run the company are hillarious. Reading the montly email updates and the Dreamhost Blog often result in some good laughs. A pretty good example of this is a recent post sharing some angry voice mails. This guy was apparently super pissed off that some guy at something.dreamhost.com was sending them tons of email and he was going to give them what they deserved. The accent is what really made it all worth it.

I hope that one day (in about 8-12 months) I’ll be able to post my own gallery of images like this one of opening a 17″ MacBook Pro. Although I think I’d elect for the smaller 100GB hard drive at 7200 RPM over the 120 GB at 5400 RPM.

Way back on episodes 4 & 5 of the Security Now Podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte the topic of discussion was “Personal Password Policies”. Most people know that you should change your passwords every six months, but how many that actually do go through the trouble of doing that actually come up with something more than just using their dog’s name or favorite color?

Of the various techniques mentioned in the podcast, there were at least two that I had already partially implemented in my own password creation routine. The first is the idea of a tiered-password system. For example, you may have one password for your banking and other high security logins, another for email and shopping sites, and a less secure password for general sites that require registration for some annoying reason. This way if someone managed to figure out your password for MySpace they wouldn’t also have the password for your bank account. The second idea is blending a word (maybe the name of your dog or something else you may be tempted to use as a password alone) and hashing it with a number. So if your dog’s name is Sparky and your zip code is 12345 you would end up with the password “s1p2a3r4k5y”. It should be fairly obvious why this password is significantly more secure than just “sparky”: it can’t be found in a dictionary, at over 10 characters it’s definitely long-ish, and by mixing two separate components someone trying to figure out your password would not only need to know two significant things about you, but also how to combine those elements.

The new ideas I learned from Security Now were additional methods of coming up with the components of a mixed password and also unique ways of combining those elements. For example, instead of using “sparky”, you could use the domain name and insert digits (phone number, zip code, birth year, etc.) in a predetermined way creating a unique password for every website. For added security you could then swap every other pair of characters or maybe add 1 to every other digit or something along those lines. If you go this route, then instead of just coming up with a different password for each security “tier” you could come up with unique algorithms for password creation at each level instead with maybe just the lowest security priority tier having a identical strong password while the higher security tiers are uniquely created dependent on the domain name or something of that nature.

I know I probably didn’t really explain this clearly so if you are interested in coming up with some really secure password methodologies, I really recommend listening to the podcast linked above or just ask questions in the comments and I can elaborate. Now though, it’s time for me to go change some passwords!

I don’t know if you Colgate alumni out there checked out this months online Colgate newsletter thing, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the university has launched a couple of features on its website making use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). For those of you not familiar with RSS or feeds, take a look at the next blog you visit for an orange “XML” button or maybe one that looks like sound waves heading in an up and to the right direction.

So if you want to keep up with what is going on in Hamilton, NY, subscribe to the Colgate RSS Feed or better yet, listen to the Colgate podcast. It’s exciting to see these technologies get adopted by organizations beyond the tech realm and hopefully everyone will be more aware of RSS and podcasts as time goes on. If you have any questions about this stuff, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve been on MoveOn.org’s email list for a few months now and while there are a few things they send out that I don’t necessarily support, they’re acting now to help stop AOL’s tiered email system. If this goes through it is definitely bad news. Maybe not as bad as a tiered internet would be, but still bad news. Instead of copying and pasting an email to all of you, I’m just going to copy the text here:

Subject: Stop AOL’s email scheme

Hi,

I just signed an important online petition because the very existence of online civic participation and the free Internet as we know it are under attack by America Online, and we need to fight back quickly.

The petition’s at:

http://civic.moveon.org/emailtax/

AOL recently announced what amounts to an “email tax.” Under this pay-to-send system, large emailers willing to pay an “email tax” can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people’s inboxes–with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation.

Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups, and even families with mailing lists will inevitably be left with inferior Internet service unless they are willing to pay the “email tax” to AOL.

The petition says: “AOL, don’t auction off preferential access to people’s inboxes to giant emailers, while leaving people’s friends, families, and favorite causes wondering if their emails are being delivered at all. The Internet is a force for democracy and economic innovation only because it is open to all Internet users equally–we must not let it become an unlevel playing field.”

AOL’s proposed pay-to-send system is the first step down the slippery slope toward dividing the Internet into two classes of users–those who get preferential treatment and those who are left behind. We must preserve the Internet for everybody.

Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online?

http://civic.moveon.org/emailtax/

Thanks!

So there you go, sign the petition.

So Johnny Five consumed a lot of information and really loved the input, but what exactly did he ever do with that input? Yeah he would spout off a few facts here and there, but did he really ever share that input with his human friends in any useful way? I don’t think so.

What is all this input/data/Johnny Five talk about? It’s about Google. No, it’s not about their search function, it’s about their Year End Zeitgeist for 2005. It’s interesting to look at the various charts that they’ve put together comparing different social/cultural interest and to see how they stack up. Interested in other years and topics? Then check out Google’s Zeitgeist Home.

A few months ago, a little bit after I had started utilizing RSS feeds, I came across a post by Lee LeFever regarding his approach to RSS. Basically if he hasn’t read a post a few days after it came out, he just deletes it.

Since I had just got into subscribing to feeds, I had no idea how someone could get so far behind, but now that I am subscribed to a ton of feeds, I’m running into the same problem. There was a while where I spent at least 30-45 minutes a night just reading feeds, however, I don’t have this much time to dedicate to that everyday so I started falling behind. Unlike Lee, I feel bad just deleting everything. I have the mindset of a collector so sometimes even after reading things I have trouble deleting them. I’ve been working on this though and I think I’m ready to take a step even more extreme than just deleting posts.

Starting last night, I am re-examining my subscriptions and just deleting the ones that I feel don’t make the cut. When I started subscribing, I’d read about another blog in one subscription, go check it out and then just subscribe. I think once I get everything cleared out to just the essentials I’m going to create a second folder of subscriptions “in review”. While a feed is “in review” I can analyze whether the content of it makes me feel like I must read it frequently or if I subconciously let the posts accumulate unread. If they just pile up, I’ll delete the subscription, or if it is something I feel I must read I’ll just move it to my main subscriptions folder. If there is a subscription I have in my “must read” folder and it starts piling up then I’ll decide whether to just clear it out like Lee or if I should demote it to “review” status.

So I finally got a myspace.com profile up for The PhiLL(er) over the past week or so and now that I’m finally getting into this whole “making friends” thing, I keep getting these stupid errors
!!!

What’s the deal?! For the most part, myspace has been the faster, better featured, and more stable version of Friendster so it sucks to see it getting all out of whack. Myspace does deserve major credit for their excellent music portion of their site. They’ve scored some major deals managing to be the exclusive place on the internet to stream Death Cab for Cuties new single.

Okay, rant over. Do I seem to be complaining a lot about online services lately?

I know that I had been complaining a lot in the past about ourmedia.org and how it was all buggy and stuff, but today I just realized that it is actually still in alpha and not even a beta test yet so that I should really just shut up. I should be happy that they were willing to open the alpha release to the public in the first place otherwise I wouldn’t even be doing a podcast due to a lack of bandwidth and space on my server.

I’ve found the new ourmedia publishing tool which is a little desktop application to upload your files to fix any odd file publishing problems I had had in the past. There was one weird thing this past weekend where I uploaded a file with it and it didn’t show up in my account, but you can usually still find the files through the internet archive if you do a good search. So anyway, I’m done complaining and realize that the services can only improve over time and that they are already performing a great service.

So what prompted all this positive ourmedia.org energy? Well it actually has to do with this entry I found on The Social Software Weblog discussing how Ourmedia was nominated as a finalist in the UN World Summit Awards. Seems as though they’re really starting to gain some positive attention in the world.

I stumbled across one of the coolest/dorkiest things ever. When I first looked at it I was amazed, some of these images do a really good job of making it look realistic. Check out this slideshow of transparent desktops.