Category Archives: Current Technology

The Useless Web: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Posted on by The Old Wolf

First, we’ll start off with the bad. That’s simply when you go to a page you thought would contain the content you were looking for, and all you get is this:

404

Of course, many websites (such as Livejournal in this case) have very creative 404 pages, which tends to reduce the sting a little bit.

Then, there’s the Ugly. These are data aggregators which are designed by black-hat SEO types; their only purpose is to get you to click on links for which they will be paid. For example, this morning I was looking for a reference to the “smiler“, an alternative punctuation mark which I first heard about in the early 60’s, about the same time as I learned of the interrobang. The “smiler” looked like this: ‿ and was designed to function as an irony mark, this long before the invention of the emoticon. Unfortunately, the preponderance of the latter, combined with the ubiquitous “smiley face,” has all but buried any possible reference to the mark I was looking for, and indeed it might have had a different name.

At any rate, I Googled for “alternative punctuation,” and the first hit on the list was this:

curiosities

This, children, is called “spamdexing.” The Wikipedia article referenced above also calls it “search engine poisoning,” and that’s about as accurate as you could want. I left a comment on their website, to wit:

“Here is a perfect example of one of the worst evils of the Internet – aggregators that offer nothing but hqiz , and pollute valid search results. This page has virtually zero to do with alternate punctuation (for example, the interrobang) and instead plugs in an SEO search phrase plus reams of unrelated camel ejecta. Thank you very little.”

Unfortunately, the web is full of this sort of douchebaggery; even “more legitimate” information aggregators such as Ask, FixYa, or Yahoo Answers tend to be full of sound and fury but signify nothing. For a diligent web searcher, it means “looking for the ruby underneath the rot,”[1] shoveling through the horse manure to find the pony, processing 10 tons of ore for one ounce of platinum.

Lastly, there’s what I consider the Good. This kind of website can be found at The Useless Web, an aggregator of totally useless but often downright amusing or intriguing single-service web pages written by everyone under the sun. More fun to waste your time with than watching the bread rise. An example of one which made me laugh is here. You can thank me later.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Life Is, Kander and Ebb, from “Zorba.”

Make your passwords even stronger

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Back in 1998, Scott Adams did a Dilbert strip that made many IT professionals cringe in sympathy.

12717.strip.zoom

As painful as this may seem, it’s one of the few times that Adams had underestimated where technology was going.

Ars Technica recently published an article entitled “Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger.” I recommend it to anyone who has data on the internet that they want to keep secure. I’ve posted about passwords before, but this article explains why the urgency to use passwords that are uncrackable is even greater. It’s a technical read, but even if you don’t read it, you should be updating all your passwords.

“Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking. Now used increasingly for computing, graphics processors allow password-cracking programs to work thousands of times faster than they did just a decade ago on similarly priced PCs that used traditional CPUs alone. A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.”

Recommendations:

  • Use a different password for each account. If one is compromised, the others remain secure.
  • Use combinations of multiple words (Seven Whipped Aardvark Quonset) which would take 27 undecillion years for a desktop PC to crack.
  • “It’s also important that a password not already be a part of the corpus of the hundreds of millions of codes already compiled in crackers’ word lists, that it be randomly generated by a computer, and that it have a minimum of nine characters to make brute-force cracks infeasible. Since it’s not uncommon for people to have dozens of accounts these days, the easiest way to put this advice into practice is to use program such as 1Password or PasswordSafe. Both apps allow users to create long, randomly generated passwords and to store them securely in a cryptographically protected file that’s unlocked with a single master password. Using a password manager to change passcodes regularly is also essential.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.