This XKCD comic hits is out of the park on password complexity vs a pass phrase.
Author: jgamblin
For a long time it was nearly impossible to tell who owned a cell phone because it didn’t provide a name on the caller ID.
Recently tnid.us has came to the attention of the security community and is giving out that information for free. I am not exactly sure how they do it but out of 10 numbers I checked 9 gave me the real name of the owner and one gave me “wireless customer”.
Good news is that there is a way to get off their list. They have a delete option that I would recommend you use if you value what little privacy your cell phone number carries.
QR codes are pretty awesome right? They are the new cool thing to stick on websites, menus, billboards, real estate signs, shirts, etc.
I mean you hold your phone up to them and they can give you a secret message, they can send txt messages from your phone, or give you a URL to visit. Pretty stinking cool right?
Scan these on your phone and see what they do.
The only thing is that there is no way to tell a malicious QR Code from a good QR Code. So if your QR code app doesnt tell you explicitly what it is going to do before it does it you should obviously look for a new app.
Hat Tip: SANS
One Saturday a month I get up and drive nearly 100 miles round trip to go and purchase some of the best meat in Missouri.
About 5 miles south of Freeburg Missouri is The Butcher Shop LLC
Even with gas at $3.60 a gallon it is worth the gas money and the time investment.
What we buy most of is their frozen beef in 1 pound tubes for ~$3.25 a pound. It is not marked but the beef has to be 90% lean. I hardly ever have to drain it after browning. The same thing in the supermarket in town here cost me $4.00 a pound.
They also have a wide variety of sausages they make in the store. Their breakfast sausages variety are awesome (we love the maple) but they make some of the best Italian sausage I have had.
One of the best things they sell is their hotwings that they make in house.
They are literally some of the best hot wings I eat. They are nearly as good as my favorite hot wings ever.
I really wanted an HDTV for my office for the last couple of months and after talking to my buddies I rigged together this setup for my office.
Supplies:
AccuSync LCD71V LCD Monitor (I bought in 2004)
KWORLD 1440 external TV tuner (my buddy had sitting around).
RCA DTA800 (Free from the government during the HD conversion)
Some old Dell speakers I had laying around.
So after cleaning up my office and getting everything wired it turned out like this:
Not a bad looking picture for what was sitting around collecting dust a few hours earlier.
I will be giving a talk at Secureworld Expo in St.Louis on September 13th on the topic:
What we can learn from LULZSEC (Yes I am trying to get the picture changed).
I really think there are a ton of lessons the average security professional can take from the mayhem they caused that they shouldn’t have been able to.
I’d love to see you there.
Do you 2FA? No its not a cool new dance. It stands for two factor authentication and its a great way to secure your accounts.
If you have a smart phone you have no good excuse not to take advantage of the extra security banks, email providers and social networks are building into their websites.
Its as simple as keeping your normal password and getting an extra “one use” password texted to you or using an application like Google Authenticator.
Popular websites that use 2FA are:
Enabling these feature will make hacking your account many times harder than with just a basic password alone.
So everyone 2FA!
My little guy loves the fries at Five Guys.
Landon happened to see my old NES and Zapper in my bedroom the other day and just had to play it. So after it getting it all hooked up and blasting ducks for a couple hours the kid was hooked.
After spending most of the last week blasting ducks (although I didnt get to level 100) we went to slackers and for $8 picked up the only two zapper games they had:
Hogans Ally
Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting
I would still love to find Wild Gunman and Mechanized Attack so If you happen to have those two games sitting in a pile I will give you $4 each for them.
With both Facebook and Google Hangouts for the first time making a webcam a “must have” for good online communications I went out and found these 720P webcams on Amazon $30 so I bought 3 of them.
Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000 720p HD Webcam
They work awesome in Windows 7 and (surprisingly) Ubuntu.