Back from my social ‘vacation’

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, I blame winter plus a host of all sorts of things that have been keeping me busy. Since the last blog post, there have been a number of things. Delano and I released One-Time Secret, along with Ruby, PHP and (thanks to Kyle Dawkins) Perl client libraries for using the API. OTS was a bit of distraction from our work on Blame Stella, but rest assured that work on Blame Stella 2.0 is still under way. We should have news on both of these projects in the near future. In this time, I did write a couple of blog posts for One-Time Secret. If you haven’t seen them, they’re here: A minor rant and pet peeve of mine: ‘Good’ vs ‘Strong’ passwords Some helpful tips on Protecting your credentials from criminals I’ve got a bunch of exciting new things on the […]... Read More

Protecting your credentials from criminals

In my previous blog post, I wrote about choosing good passwords. However, most hack attempts don’t involve password hacking/guessing at all. Even dictionary attacks — which are far more common that brute force attacks — are not the most common way that criminals get at your account information and private data. In this blog post, I’ll mention some of the more common attacks, and how you can protect yourself against them. Throughout this post, I use the word criminal instead of hacker to distinguish between the two senses of the word that hacker has. In the media, hacker is synonymous with ‘computer criminal’ — the bad people who steal money from banks or who use computers to defraud people. In IT communities however, hackers are a sub-culture of software/hardware developers and enthusiasts who are simply interested in technology, software and security. The vast majority of them are not criminals, and in […]... Read More

Good passwords

One of my pet peeves about security are people who advocate for ‘strong’ passwords. Everyone knows these people, they’re the tech support person who tells you your password must have a minimum number of characters that you only use when censoring expletives. Even worse, some of them use a random password generator to assign a password to you that you’re unable to change. The argument for this is that if you have a wider range of characters in your password, you have greater entropy and therefore it is harder for your password to be hacked. Now, while there is some truth to that, there are numerous flaws in the logic when using it to determine a good security policy: 1. Most hack attempts are not ‘guesses’ High entropy is great when there is a brute force attempt to gain access. This is where the attacker uses an automated mechanism to […]... Read More

SimpleRSSEmbed – my first WordPress plugin

Ok, I’ve been doing all sorts of things with WordPress for a while now, but oddly enough, I never actually wrote a plugin (although, in retrospect, I did a lot of template hacks that probably would have been easier to do as plugins). Anyway, I needed a plugin for a blog I was working on that would allow me to display the summary of N number of blog posts from another blog. There seem to be plenty of existing plugins that do this, however most of them are either horrible code (both HTML and PHP), or they don’t work with Atom feeds that don’t have descriptions. I wanted something very simple, with very clean output that would ‘just work’™. So, after trying about a dozen of them, I decided to just write my own (which turned out to be insanely easy). If I would have started down that path at […]... Read More

Upgrading software RAID drives (and increase capacity)

Disclaimer: This is one of those semi-selfish posts, where I need to perform a task that I do only once in a while. So, to save myself from having to search these steps every time, I’m documenting it here with the use of digital software as sodapdf that help with this. I hope someone else will find this useful as well. Upgrading your software drives may be necessary when you’re installing a new software for your work or business. For instance, if you decide to use a software with conjoint analysis features to better understand your market research data and use it for your marketing strategies. Recently, I decided to upgrade the drives in my desktop and added the borderlands 3 split screen so I could work in several tasks ta the same time. Since I don’t like the idea of downtime due to a failed drive (my desktop is […]... Read More