I read this article (via slashdot) this afternoon. The data from the Rockyou.com breach does indeed give a fascinating insight into the password choices of ordinary web users. What was shocking is that almost 50% of the passwords used were shockingly weak, including names, the name of the website itself and consecutive characters, e.g. abc123. People use these weak passwords because they are easy to remember, but mostly because we're all in so deep with IT that we need a multitude of passwords and usernames just to get us through the working day. Repeating the same dodgy old password and registering your username and password as the same seems to be an easy solution.
It isn't. Here's my 3 top tips for strong, easy to remember passwords:
1. Don't use straight words which can be guessed or discovered by a brute force attack, nicknames are really popular. If you want to use words or nicknames mix up the letters with other characters, play around with the cases, even try spelling out letters you for u eye for i- this stops them becoming 'dictionary words', e.g.:
sassygirl becomes
5assy9irl
5as$y9ir(
5As$y9iR(
2. Lengthen it out- try to make all of your passwords 8 characters or more. If that's a lot to remember then try using the the initial letters of a memorable sentence, song, book etc.; if it has to be a solely numeric password try two phone numbers you no longer use or a selection of house numbers- not your date of birth!
ishfwilf (I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For)
anwyccdfy (ask not what your country can do for you)
ouatiagffa (once upon a time in a galaxy far far away)
Combine the strategies and you have something that is meaningless to everyone but you:
i5hFw1L4
@nwy2cdfU
0u@ia9ffA
3. If you really can't remember your passwords, write them down. This used to be the cardinal sin of the workplace, users wrote down their username and password then promptly taped it to the monitor. I'm not suggesting you tape your hotmail password to the monitor, but there is less harm in writing your password (with no description of what it is), or, even better, something to remind you of your password on a piece of paper to keep in your wallet than there is in being abc123 on every website you use. What I'm trying to protect you from is someone finding your password online: no one is going to hack your wallet.
Hope this is useful!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Cheeky, sneaky, Friday afternoon movie
Up in the Air (dir. Jason Reitman)
So Marsh and I snuck out yesterday afternoon to watch Up in the Air at the Arts. Watching movies in the afternoon is something that I always enjoy, you get to mix with an odd blend of retired people, students and one guy who looked like he worked a constant night-shift. After cheese toasties and beer for lunch (which always remind me of Blackburn library- the toasties, if not the beer) we settled down to watch George Clooney illustrate the ways in which air travel can still be glamorous and romantic. George's character, Ryan Bingham, lives in a whirl of loyalty cards, air miles, upgrades and Hilton suites; certainly not the kind of character who flies Easy Jet or ever struggles through security with three children and five suitcases. The routines of express check-in, complimentary drinks and room service are the circadian rhythms of his life on the road. "To know me, is to fly with me," he declares in an opening scene voice over, but there is more to him than the jet lifestyle; for every complimentary vodka tonic there is a faceless snowy car park or anonymous office block. Ryan's job is an emploment transition specialist: he fires people for a living, fires people whose bosses have been too cowardly, gutless or busy to actually do the dirty themselves. His very entrance into a building provokes a sense of terror and recoil in the unfortunate soon to be ex-employees, like a spectre of death or pestilence moving across the drab industrial carpet tiles.
During his regular motivational speaking engagements Bingham declares 'We're not swans. We're sharks,' his message in 'What's in your backpack?' is that if you want to live the no strings lifestyle he promotes, then we must down-size our stuff; stuff includes our personal relations. A chance meeting on the road with Alex, Vera Farmiga on top form, piques his interest. She's smart, sassy, sexy and most importantly, she's a shark too- line of the film for me was 'just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina.' The easy route for the story would be for Bingham to fall in love with and be reformed by Alex, but this film resists easy, twee conclusions, witnessed by Alex and Ryan's post coital laptop schedule checking to arrange their next encounter.
There has to be thaw though, and when it comes it seems quite hokey. The groundwork is done by Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new high flier (but not in the Bingham sense) at the company. A soft centre affecting a hard shell, Natalie becomes a walking , talking conscience for Bingham when she accompanies him on the road- her emotional outpouring in the hotel lobby is also one of the best incidents of schadenfreude I've ever experienced. Natalie's grand idea is to cut the travel budget by introducing sacking by web cam. Bingham is naturally appalled: despite the tie wallet, miniature scotch and airline sushi, Bingham believes that if you're going to wreck someones life by sacking them from the company they've worked for for thirty years, then you might at least do it to their face. There's also the small matter of his miles. Bingham has amassed a serious number of air miles and is chasing a number that he will not share with Alex, could Natalie's grand idea ground him before he makes it? The second wave of emotional thaw takes place at his sister's wedding, ostensibly and discordantly hokey, but a necessary interlude for the conclusion to exert maximum effect.
Away from the story line I was very impressed with the aerial photography of the cities on Bingham's journey, the cinematography was slick throughout, with interesting angles and great locations. Clooney was impressive as the likeable Bingham, but Vera Farmiga stole the show for me- fresh and funny with her talents running the gamut from hopeful and world-weary to darkly manipulative. Mention must also be made of the extras, real-life redundant employees who padded out this unorthodox love story with gritty, real reactions.
I won't reveal if Bingham reaches the magic number or whether the lifelong shark sprouts feathers and a long neck, but the conclusion was pleasantly revolutionary; refreshingly, not in any way you'd expect.
Marsh also liked it, but thought it wasn't Oscar material.
So Marsh and I snuck out yesterday afternoon to watch Up in the Air at the Arts. Watching movies in the afternoon is something that I always enjoy, you get to mix with an odd blend of retired people, students and one guy who looked like he worked a constant night-shift. After cheese toasties and beer for lunch (which always remind me of Blackburn library- the toasties, if not the beer) we settled down to watch George Clooney illustrate the ways in which air travel can still be glamorous and romantic. George's character, Ryan Bingham, lives in a whirl of loyalty cards, air miles, upgrades and Hilton suites; certainly not the kind of character who flies Easy Jet or ever struggles through security with three children and five suitcases. The routines of express check-in, complimentary drinks and room service are the circadian rhythms of his life on the road. "To know me, is to fly with me," he declares in an opening scene voice over, but there is more to him than the jet lifestyle; for every complimentary vodka tonic there is a faceless snowy car park or anonymous office block. Ryan's job is an emploment transition specialist: he fires people for a living, fires people whose bosses have been too cowardly, gutless or busy to actually do the dirty themselves. His very entrance into a building provokes a sense of terror and recoil in the unfortunate soon to be ex-employees, like a spectre of death or pestilence moving across the drab industrial carpet tiles.
During his regular motivational speaking engagements Bingham declares 'We're not swans. We're sharks,' his message in 'What's in your backpack?' is that if you want to live the no strings lifestyle he promotes, then we must down-size our stuff; stuff includes our personal relations. A chance meeting on the road with Alex, Vera Farmiga on top form, piques his interest. She's smart, sassy, sexy and most importantly, she's a shark too- line of the film for me was 'just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina.' The easy route for the story would be for Bingham to fall in love with and be reformed by Alex, but this film resists easy, twee conclusions, witnessed by Alex and Ryan's post coital laptop schedule checking to arrange their next encounter.
There has to be thaw though, and when it comes it seems quite hokey. The groundwork is done by Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new high flier (but not in the Bingham sense) at the company. A soft centre affecting a hard shell, Natalie becomes a walking , talking conscience for Bingham when she accompanies him on the road- her emotional outpouring in the hotel lobby is also one of the best incidents of schadenfreude I've ever experienced. Natalie's grand idea is to cut the travel budget by introducing sacking by web cam. Bingham is naturally appalled: despite the tie wallet, miniature scotch and airline sushi, Bingham believes that if you're going to wreck someones life by sacking them from the company they've worked for for thirty years, then you might at least do it to their face. There's also the small matter of his miles. Bingham has amassed a serious number of air miles and is chasing a number that he will not share with Alex, could Natalie's grand idea ground him before he makes it? The second wave of emotional thaw takes place at his sister's wedding, ostensibly and discordantly hokey, but a necessary interlude for the conclusion to exert maximum effect.
Away from the story line I was very impressed with the aerial photography of the cities on Bingham's journey, the cinematography was slick throughout, with interesting angles and great locations. Clooney was impressive as the likeable Bingham, but Vera Farmiga stole the show for me- fresh and funny with her talents running the gamut from hopeful and world-weary to darkly manipulative. Mention must also be made of the extras, real-life redundant employees who padded out this unorthodox love story with gritty, real reactions.
I won't reveal if Bingham reaches the magic number or whether the lifelong shark sprouts feathers and a long neck, but the conclusion was pleasantly revolutionary; refreshingly, not in any way you'd expect.
Marsh also liked it, but thought it wasn't Oscar material.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Angie, don't be a hero!
I've been thinking a lot recently about delegation. I watched a colleague struggle to complete a wide-ranging task, and realised she was struggling because of lack of delegation. Normally this is easy to deal with: you have too much work to complete in a given time frame, you delegate tasks to appropriate co-workers- job done. The problem in this instance was that it wasn't my colleague that couldn't delegate, it was the boss.
Good managers need to be able to perform hands-off as well as hands-on. It's easy to spot a colleague struggling with a new task, or one that's utterly snowed under. There are obvious solutions too: restructure their work, offer extra help and training until they've mastered the new task, even just being patient and cutting them a little slack. Great hands-off managers don't hang around your computer screen all day, they don't ask for updates on a project every two minutes: they let you get on with the job and trust you to make the right decisions. What they certainly don't do is delegate a task, watch you perform it, and then redo it themselves. Unless there is something significantly wrong with what your employee has done, this kind of action renders their hard work pointless and makes them feel like they can't be trusted with their work.
It is behaviour I've seen many times, and behaviour I have been guilty of in the past. Often I find it happens to me when I'm working on something really big, or a complex task that has many smaller elements. At times like this I'm blinded by detail- I can't see the big picture because of the little things on my to do list. It's a bit like producing exciting veg and sumptuous sauces for Christmas, but forgetting to put the turkey in the oven. But sometimes the reason that I do this is because I am a hero. I don't wear my underwear over my pants, but sometimes 'I can just do it better than you', sometimes 'I don't mind sticking around until it's finished' and sometimes it is 'five more minutes' which turns into all day. Basically, I might not look like Superman, might not be as good or as useful as Superman, but that won't stop me acting like I am.
The solution. Take regular tea breaks. Take lunch. Leave when your colleagues do. If they won't leave; make them. Most importantly, assess the skills of your team, recognise what people are truly good at and what they may be good at (given the chance). Accept that failures along the way are a risk of pursuing success.
Read more about heroes from Alex Payne. He writes much, much better than me so I'll leave him to it.
Good managers need to be able to perform hands-off as well as hands-on. It's easy to spot a colleague struggling with a new task, or one that's utterly snowed under. There are obvious solutions too: restructure their work, offer extra help and training until they've mastered the new task, even just being patient and cutting them a little slack. Great hands-off managers don't hang around your computer screen all day, they don't ask for updates on a project every two minutes: they let you get on with the job and trust you to make the right decisions. What they certainly don't do is delegate a task, watch you perform it, and then redo it themselves. Unless there is something significantly wrong with what your employee has done, this kind of action renders their hard work pointless and makes them feel like they can't be trusted with their work.
It is behaviour I've seen many times, and behaviour I have been guilty of in the past. Often I find it happens to me when I'm working on something really big, or a complex task that has many smaller elements. At times like this I'm blinded by detail- I can't see the big picture because of the little things on my to do list. It's a bit like producing exciting veg and sumptuous sauces for Christmas, but forgetting to put the turkey in the oven. But sometimes the reason that I do this is because I am a hero. I don't wear my underwear over my pants, but sometimes 'I can just do it better than you', sometimes 'I don't mind sticking around until it's finished' and sometimes it is 'five more minutes' which turns into all day. Basically, I might not look like Superman, might not be as good or as useful as Superman, but that won't stop me acting like I am.
The solution. Take regular tea breaks. Take lunch. Leave when your colleagues do. If they won't leave; make them. Most importantly, assess the skills of your team, recognise what people are truly good at and what they may be good at (given the chance). Accept that failures along the way are a risk of pursuing success.
Read more about heroes from Alex Payne. He writes much, much better than me so I'll leave him to it.
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