Posted via web from ivanwalsh’s posterous

Posted via web from ivanwalsh’s posterous

Yesterday we looked at how to setup a strong password and how to test its strength. What I’d like to cover today are the type of mistakes people make when creating passwords and how to avoid this. If you’re planning on opening a PayPal account or use eBay to buy and sell, then I think you should read this.

How to avoid weak, easy-to-guess passwords:

1. Avoid sequences or word or repeated characters.

Examples of these are “12345678,” “778899″ “abcdefg,”

2. Letters on your keyboard that sit next to each other are also a mistake. For example, qwertqwert.  These are very weak passwords.

3. Avoid using look-alike substitutions of numbers and symbols.

This means that you don’t replace an ‘i’ with a ’1′ or an ‘a’ with ‘@’ as in “M1cr0$0ft” or “P@ssw0rd. These are too easy to guess.

However, these substitutions can be effective when combined with other measures, such as length, misspellings, or variations in upper and lowercase, to improve the strength of your password.

4. Avoid your login name.

5. Don’t use any part of your name, birthday, social security number.

6. Avoid words taken out of the dictionary.

7. Tools can guess passwords based on words in multiple dictionaries, including words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and substitutions.

8. Use multiple passwords

If any one of the computers or websites using your password is compromised, then all of your other information protected by that password will be compromised as well.

So, try to use different passwords for different systems.

9. Don’t store your password online.

I know this sounds obvious but, if others find your passwords stored online (or on a networked computer), they have access to all your information.

Takeaway tips:

• Long passwords are stronger than short ones.
• The more characters you add to your password, the more you increase its level of protection.
• Passwords should be 8 or more characters in length; 14 characters or more is ideal.
• Strongest passwords combine both length and different types of symbols.
• Use symbols by holding down the ‘Shift’ key and typing a number are very useful in developing strong passwords.
• Choose symbols unique to your language.
• Use the space bar in passwords.
• Combine letters, numbers, and symbols.
• The greater the combination you use in your password, the harder it is to guess.

PS – If you’ve found this article useful, please consider giving us a Digg or StumbleUpon.

Regards,

Ivan

Twitter: @ivanwalsh

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh

Templates: http://www.klariti.com

Tips:  http://www.ivanwalsh.com

Yesterday we looked at different ways to protect your PayPal account. We looked at how to setup a strong password and how to test its strength.

There are a few other things I wanted to add to the last article so I’m adding them here. If you’re going to open a PayPal account or use eBay to buy and sell, then I think you should read this. There is no point making a successful online business if others can highjack your account.

How to create a strong password:

1. Write down a sentence that will form the basis of strong password. For example, “My son Ivan was born on May 7 1998.”

2. Check if your computer supports pass phrases.

If you can use a pass phrase (i.e. spaces between characters) on your computer, then use this approach.

3. If the computer does not support pass phrases, convert it to a password.

For example, take the first letter of each word of the sentence that you’ve created to create a new password.

Using the example above, you’d get: “mstwbom71998″.

4. Combine uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers to add an extra level of complexity.

You can further strengthen this by adding letter swapping and misspellings.

For instance, in the pass phrase above, consider misspelling Ivan’s name (e.g. Evan), or substituting the word “seven” for the number 7.

Remember: the longer the sentence, the more complex your password will be.

Your pass phrase might become “My sOn evan waS bORn on MAy 7 1998″

5. Add special characters.

Use symbols that look like letters, combine words, remove spaces between words to make the password more complex.

Using these tricks, we create a pass phrase of “MysOn ev@n waS b#Rn o% M*y 7 1998″ or a password (using the first letter of each word) “MsewaSbMAy71998”

6. Test your password with Microsoft’s Password Checker

This is a non-recording password checking site that helps determine your password’s strength.

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx

Test the strength of your passwords: Enter a password in the text box to have Password Checker help determine its strength as you type.

Note: Password Checker can help you to gauge the strength of your password. It is for personal reference only. Password Checker does not guarantee the security of the password itself.

PS – If you’ve found this article useful, please consider giving us a Digg or StumbleUpon.

Regards,

Ivan

Twitter: @ivanwalsh

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh

Templates: http://www.klariti.com / Tips:  http://www.ivanwalsh.com

Yesterday we looked at different ways to protect your PayPal account. We looked at how to setup a strong password and how to test its strength.

There are a few other things I wanted to add to the last article so I’m adding them here. If you’re going to open a PayPal account or use eBay to buy and sell, then I think you should read this. There is no point making a successful online business if others can highjack your account.

How to create a strong password:

1. Write down a sentence that will form the basis of strong password. For example, “My son Ivan was born on May 7 1998.”

2. Check if your computer supports pass phrases.

If you can use a pass phrase (i.e. spaces between characters) on your computer, then use this approach.

3. If the computer does not support pass phrases, convert it to a password.

For example, take the first letter of each word of the sentence that you’ve created to create a new password.

Using the example above, you’d get: “mstwbom71998″.

4. Combine uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers to add an extra level of complexity.

You can further strengthen this by adding letter swapping and misspellings.

For instance, in the pass phrase above, consider misspelling Ivan’s name (e.g. Evan), or substituting the word “seven” for the number 7.

Remember: the longer the sentence, the more complex your password will be.

Your pass phrase might become “My sOn evan waS bORn on MAy 7 1998″

5. Add special characters.

Use symbols that look like letters, combine words, remove spaces between words to make the password more complex.

Using these tricks, we create a pass phrase of “MysOn ev@n waS b#Rn o% M*y 7 1998″ or a password (using the first letter of each word) “MsewaSbMAy71998”

6. Test your password with Microsoft’s Password Checker

This is a non-recording password checking site that helps determine your password’s strength.

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx

Test the strength of your passwords: Enter a password in the text box to have Password Checker help determine its strength as you type.

Note: Password Checker can help you to gauge the strength of your password. It is for personal reference only. Password Checker does not guarantee the security of the password itself.

PS – If you’ve found this article useful, please consider giving us a Digg or StumbleUpon.

Regards,

Ivan

Twitter: @ivanwalsh

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh

Templates: http://www.klariti.com / Tips:  http://www.ivanwalsh.com

Personally, I don’t use PayPal Buy Now or Donations when sending out emails. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1) it’s too hard sell – selling directly through email rarely works.

2) spam filters will pick it out and send your lovely email to the spam filter, adding your email address to the ISPs blacklist in the process (which you can’t undo) and

3) many people (myself included) turn off images in their email.

In other words, I never see any images when I use Yahoo or Hotmail. This means that my emails download faster (less bandwidth required) without images and most are just eye candy with no value add.

To quote Ken Brockman – Just my 2 cents.

There is the easy way and the hard way to do things in life. This is one of the easy ways. You can use this trick to setup Blogger so that it automatically adds a snippet of Adsense code to your Blogger template. This saves you the hassle of cutting and pasting Adsense into each post or other workarounds that eat up your time.

To get Adsense to appear between the Blogger post title and Blogger post body:

1. Log into Blogger.

2. Open the Template page.

3. Click the Edit HTML tab and select Expand Widget Templates.

4. Search for these lines in the HTML code.

Search for the line <p><data:post.body/></p>

5. Add these lines of code (depending on how you want your ads to appear)

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “item”‘>
Place Your Google Adsense Code here
<p><data:post.body/></p>
Place Your Google Adsense Code here
<b:else/>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
</b:if>

6. Click Save.

Your Google Ads will now appear above every post you make.

Take a look at http://ivanwalsh.blogspot.com/ to see how it works.

Can I use Wordles for...

May I make money off of Wordle images?

You must first display your Wordle at the desired size, then take a “screen shot” or “screen capture”. Here’s a link to a web site that gives instructions for creating screen shots on various kinds of computer. By linking to this external site, I do not endorse it: take-a-screenshot.org.

How is Wordle licensed? May I embed your applet?

Creating a strong password helps in protecting your account information and, if you run an online business, access to your financial data. For example, if you decide to open a PayPal account and want to buy and sell stuff online, then you need to think carefully about the type of password you’ll need to use. So, here are some tips and guidelines on setting up a super strong password. We’ll also show you how to test the strength of your password.

What makes a strong password?

A strong password must use a random string of characters.

In other words, using the following string – LiVerP8%%L- is better than Liverpool. You can see straightaway how complex the password is
and the effort it would take to open.

Use the following as when creating your passwords:

1. Long passwords are stronger than short ones.

2. The more characters you add to your password, the more you increase its level of protection.

3. Passwords should be 8 or more characters in length; 14 characters or more is ideal.

4. A 15-character password – made up of random letters and numbers – is 33,000 times stronger than an 8-character password composed of characters from the entire keyboard.

5. If you cannot create a password that contains symbols, make it very long to get the same degree of protection.

Symbols are characters such as @,#,$,%,^,&,*,),_,+, and |.

6. The strongest passwords combine both length and different types of symbols.

7. Use the top keys on your keyboard (@,#,$,%,^), not just letters.

8. Use symbols by holding down the ‘Shift’
key and typing a number are very useful in developing strong passwords.

9. Choose from all the symbols on the keyboard, including punctuation marks not on the upper row (top) of the keyboard,

10. Choose symbols unique to your language.

11. Many IT systems now support use of the space bar in passwords. This means you can create a phrase made of many words (a ”pass phrase”).

12. Combine letters, numbers, and symbols.

The greater the combination you use in your password, the harder it is to guess.

PS – If you’ve found this article useful, please consider giving us a Digg or StumbleUpon.

Regards,

Ivan

Twitter: @ivanwalsh

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh

Templates: http://www.klariti.com

Tips:  http://www.ivanwalsh.com

Creating a strong password helps in protecting your account information and, if you run an online business, access to your financial data. For example, if you decide to open a PayPal account and want to buy and sell stuff online, then you need to think carefully about the type of password you’ll need to use. So, here are some tips and guidelines on setting up a super strong password. We’ll also show you how to test the strength of your password.

What makes a strong password?

A strong password must use a random string of characters.

In other words, using the following string – LiVerP8%%L- is better than Liverpool. You can see straightaway how complex the password is
and the effort it would take to open.

Use the following as when creating your passwords:

1. Long passwords are stronger than short ones.

2. The more characters you add to your password, the more you increase its level of protection.

3. Passwords should be 8 or more characters in length; 14 characters or more is ideal.

4. A 15-character password – made up of random letters and numbers – is 33,000 times stronger than an 8-character password composed of characters from the entire keyboard.

5. If you cannot create a password that contains symbols, make it very long to get the same degree of protection.

Symbols are characters such as @,#,$,%,^,&,*,),_,+, and |.

6. The strongest passwords combine both length and different types of symbols.

7. Use the top keys on your keyboard (@,#,$,%,^), not just letters.

8. Use symbols by holding down the ‘Shift’
key and typing a number are very useful in developing strong passwords.

9. Choose from all the symbols on the keyboard, including punctuation marks not on the upper row (top) of the keyboard,

10. Choose symbols unique to your language.

11. Many IT systems now support use of the space bar in passwords. This means you can create a phrase made of many words (a ”pass phrase”).

12. Combine letters, numbers, and symbols.

The greater the combination you use in your password, the harder it is to guess.

PS – If you’ve found this article useful, please consider giving us a Digg or StumbleUpon.

Regards,

Ivan

Twitter: @ivanwalsh

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ivanwalsh

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh

Templates: http://www.klariti.com

Tips:  http://www.ivanwalsh.com

You can’t upgrade to the ‘all-new Yahoo! Mail’ if you’re PC setting are under 1024 x 768 pixels. At least that’s what happened this afternoon when I tried to upgrade. This is the error message you get from Yahoo.

[ad#ad1]

They give me a few options:

1. You can continue with your current settings, but you won’t be able to enjoy the full effect.

2. To continue to the all-new Yahoo! Mail anyway… [which sounds very lame, imho]

3. Go to Yahoo! Mail

4. Go to Yahoo! Mail Classic just this one time [read that again -just this one time! Am I back in high-school?]

5. Or better yet, try increasing your screen’s resolution.

Jerry Wang and co tells me, “If you’re running Windows, here’s how:
Click the Start button, and select Settings, then Control Panel. Next, double-click Display and click the Settings tab. Use the slider to set your monitor to a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution.

The problem is that these are my settings. See here:

Anyway, they’re pretty friendly about it and tell me to ‘Switch back to Yahoo! Mail Classic indefinitely — or at least until your system is ready.’

Until my system is ready…

and not until Yahoo gets its act together.

Could be a long time.

Question: Have you made the switch to Yahoo Mail yet? Let me know how it went or better still what it looks like.

From the outside, looking in.

Ivan

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Unobtrusive Sidenotes combines Javascript and CSS so that you can incorporate sidenotes into your web pages or blogs. It even includes a handy set of colors (all set in CSS and tweak-able) to create that oh-so-subtle correlation between the sidenote and the relevant text.
[ad#5links]
The developers –Arc90Lab – believe that footnotes, at least the ones worth reading, are usually far away from the line-of-sight we’re focused on when we read.

It would be nice to be able to optionally just glance over and take that brief little detour if we so choose. It’s footnotes on steroids: sidenotes. The Atlantic Monthly dipped its toe into sidenotes about a year ago in their April 2005 issue.

Sidenotes are completely styled up through CSS. You can set the border and background color of sidenotes as well as positioning with CSS. The colors for side notes and highlighting will alternate between four set color schemes. You can easily change the default colors by editing the CSS that is referenced by the script. The specific CSS styles are included in the HTML file as well as the example link below.

You can also control where the sidenotes end up relative to the paragraph through the CSS. In our example code, the sidenotes alternate between left and right floating within the passage.

You can easily set the sidenotes to only float left or right by tweaking the CSS (left requires no float attribute at all, right simply requires “float: right”).

Currently, the unobtrusive sidenotes script has been tested and confirmed on the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6.0+
• Mozilla Firefox 1.5+
• Apple Safari 2.0
• Opera Version 8.51

Licensing: This arc90 tool is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

Visit: http://lab.arc90.com/2006/05/unobtrusive_sidenotes.php#more

Demo: http://lab.arc90.com/tools/sidenote/

I’ve been trying to justify making the switch to Google Chrome – I’m a big fan of Firefox – so this news on the Chrome site interested me. 3D in a browser?

“a team at Google is actually taking a step in that direction by introducing O3D: a shader-based API for 3D graphics in the browser. This API allows for the development of sophisticated 3D applications that rival experiences one would expect in native applications. Technology like this will eventually make launching high quality games as easy as clicking a link in your browser.”

What is O3D?

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.

• Download the plug-in (Windows and Mac) and explore the samples to see O3D’s capabilities.
• Read the Technical Overview
• Developer’s Guide to learn how to get started.
• Join the O3D developer groups to provide feedback.

Google Chrome Blog: 3D graphics in the browser (no joke)

Lab. Arc90.com have come up with another great tool. Think of blogging with an interactive whiteboard attached for you to show people what you’re talking about.

“If you track sites like basement.org you’ll see that most of the write-ups are pretty long. It takes quite a bit to gather your thoughts, organize, write a draft, review and revise what you’re trying to get across. Wouldn’t it be cool to somehow recreate the immediacy and efficiency of gathering a few people around a whiteboard and talking for a few minutes?”

[ad]

The result of all this is Sketch.basement.org.

This tools merges the power of blogging with the “high-bandwidth” experience of talking and scribbling at the same time.

Sketchcasting is effectively a podcast with a whiteboard.

Under the hood, they’re just Youtube videos that record the talking-and-drawing experience. They’re recorded, uploaded then shown in typical blog fashion.

You can watch them and share them, subscribe to the RSS feed or even grab the iTunes video podcast feed to watch the sketchcasts on your iPod or iPhone.

Visit: http://lab.arc90.com/2007/07/introducing_sketchcasting.php

Jeff Leget, Director of Operations, at Clickbank discusses potential security issues on the new IE and Firefox releases. He highlight that the ‘consumer misconception about browser cookies plagues many online retailers. When consumers blindly disable cookies, online retailers have difficulty providing a targeted and personalized experience to the consumer.”

This point is taken up by one of Clickbank’s retailers who asks if “Chrome is able to let the user do private browsing, meaning the cookie in a user’s PC is deleted latest at the end of a session. How will ClickBank track a sale when the same user attempts to purchase an item in another session, perhaps days later, yet the affiliate’s cookie is not on the user’s PC anymore?”

What proprietary methods are used by ClickBank to overcome this problem?

ClickBank’s response is that the default security settings in Google Chrome do NOT inhibit affiliate commission tracking through Hoplinks to the order form. Google Chrome accepts the 1st party cookie that ClickBank sets. Google Chrome does offer security “tweaks” that restrict 3rd party cookies. When affiliates use Hoplinks correctly (meaning the Hoplink is not embedded in an image or frame) these settings do not affect the functionality of the ClickBank 1st party cookies.

Of course, you can setup your browser so that it erases cookies after each session. Clickbank  add that after analyzing millions of Hoplinks it receives, they found that nearly all users complete their purchase within the same browser session within 1 hour. In most cases, even if the user does erase their cookies, ClickBank’s proprietary tracking methods often match the consumer back to the referring affiliate. ClickBank’s proprietary tracking methods are considered a trade secret and cannot be shared here.

However, another raises a potential issue. “I just tested it with FireFox, I clicked on a well formatted hop-link, ended up on a vendor page. Then I removed the cookie from FireFox, closed FireFox, re-started FireFox and went directly to the vendor page, now in a new session. Following the link to the order payment form I noticed this at the bottom:

[affiliate = none]

Hence, it doesn’t appear to be tracked by Clickbank anymore, does it? Or is it still doing a proper tracking but merely doesn’t display the [affiliate = whoever] note at the bottom of the payment form?

Full article: http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2008/09/04/ie8-beta-and-the-attack-on-cookies/