Via I, Cringely: CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS:
With this fact in mind, then, I’ll take another stab at improving the data security of all Americans. CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS!! Most people don’t do this — ever. They have one or two passwords they use for everything, often associated with one or two user names. If a system forces a password change they’ll move to password B in hopes that when the next move is forced they can move back to password A. If you have an eight-character password that mixes numbers, letters, and non-alphanumeric characters in various combinations of upper and lower case — in other words a REALLY GOOD password — I can pretty much guarantee you’ve been using that exact same password since 1998. People are lazy. People don’t want to learn arcane eight-character passwords on a regular basis.
But identity thieves aren’t so lazy, especially when they have technology to help them. They can start a sweepstakes website that requires only free registration to win that cruise of a lifetime to Bora Bora. And in doing so the thieves can know that a majority of registrants will use a username and password combination that they also use at a lot of other sites, like bank and brokerage accounts. Not only don’t they need to actually award the cruise, they don’t even have to break into your bank account in order to benefit from the username/password combo. They just sell that information to another crook.
That crook knows your name, address, and likely username and password. Forty percent of the people in your town use the same bank. Fifty percent of his stolen usernames and passwords are valid. Forty percent of bank customers use online banking. Add this all together and that crook has more than enough information to raid the bank accounts of enough folks to make his day and ruin theirs.
It doesn’t take just a fake website to accomplish this kind of phishing expedition. There are thousands — probably tens of thousands — of web operations that require user sign-ons but don’t do anything to protect the user database from being stolen by employees. “We’re not selling anything,” they tell themselves, “so it doesn’t matter.”
It matters.
Half my credit card accounts now require me to go through an elaborate e-mail validation scheme if I try logging in from a new IP address or from a computer lacking the proper cookie. Half don’t require this. The half that do were probably the targets of some huge and successful crime spree — a spree we never heard of because it was never made public. Billions of dollars are ripped off this way each year from banks and other financial institutions but we never hear about it because that might encourage more crime.
So CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS and put an end to this kind of scam. Perhaps remembering new character strings will help to stave off Alzheimer’s.
At any given time, I have about three different passwords. One for sensitive financial-type stuff. One for things like e-mail accounts. And one for stupid BS I don’t care about. The first two types, I change routinely. That last type, I almost never change; but at the same time, I don’t much care if you can access anything stored under that password.
November 19th, 2007
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General |
17 comments
So, yeah, that global warming thing. Seems it’s gonna be pretty bad:
Global warming is destroying species, raising sea levels and threatening millions of poor people, the United Nations’ top scientific panel will say today in a report that U.N. officials hope will help mobilize the world into taking tougher actions on climate change.
The report argues that only firm action, including putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, will avoid more catastrophic events. Those actions will take a small part of the world’s economic growth but will be substantially less than the costs of doing nothing, the report will say.
And it seems that some of the deniers were right about one thing: the IPCC was not entirely accurate. Unfortunately for them, the effects of climate change are happening much more quickly than the IPCC claims:
Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.
“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”
Climate change is real and it is happening rather quickly. It is going to kill a lot of people, displace countless others, and disrupt the farming and economic patterns of the entire globe. It is long past time people got past their “I hate hippies” hang ups and started treating this problem as if we were all adults. In exchange for a minor, temporary blip in economic growth, we can literally save millions and avert a catastrophe. That has to be mor eimportant than the profits of a handful of campaign donors and your dislike of long hair and bad acid rock.
Because in twenty years, when your children and your grandchildren are asking you how the hell did you let this happen, I don’t think they are going to be sympathetic to “James Inhofe said the dirty f*cking hippy scientists were wrong!”
November 19th, 2007
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General, Climate Change |
18 comments
I hate this attitude:
“I like Reagan’s rule applied to his party: speak no ill of Republicans. I don’t like it when our party, that agrees on 95 percent of the issues, so exacerbate the nuances of differences.”
– House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer,
Yes, the Democrats do agree on about 90 to 95% of their policy goals. But that extra 5% can be meaningful, each candidate is going to have different priorities, and there are rather large differences in the plans to achieve even the 95% everyone agrees should be achieved. Now, baseless attacks and playing into Republican talking points is one thing, but this is a primary. We are supposed to have a spirited discussion about where the candidates want to take the country first and how they plan to get there. I am sorry if that makes for sometimes uncomfortable moments at party functions and I am sorry if that appears to be too messy a process for our ever so distinguished party leaders. But that’s democracy. It’s meant to work that way.
It’s a little bit disturbing that so many people in our press and the upper echelons of both parties seems to have such a visceral hatred of the mechanics of politics.
November 19th, 2007
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Politics |
3 comments
