Tips on safeguarding your password

First and foremost, NEVER give your password to anyone. “Anyone” means your coworkers, your spouse, your systems administrator. In the event of an emergency, the sysadmin can change your password. Your sytems administrator never has a need to know your personal password. If someone needs to get onto our machines, and has a reason to be here, do not give them access to your account. Speak to the systems staff about us setting up an account for them. We would be very happy to give them one.

Make your password something you can remember. Do not write it down. If you really, honestly forget your password, we can easily give you a new one. We’d rather set your password once a month because you forgot it than have someone find it written down and gain unauthorized access to your account.

Make your password difficult for others to guess. This is not as hard as it initially seems. See the section below on chosing a good password.

DO NOT Change your password because of mail from someone claiming to be your systems administrator, supposedly needing access to your files!! This is a popular scam in some circles. Remember, your systems administrator never needs your password for any reason. If someone needs to ask you to change your password so that they can gain entry to your account, they do not have reason to be there.

We run sophisticated password crackers on the password files of our machines. If we guess your password, you will have to come see a staffer to have it changed. These are the same crackers that the bad guys have access to, so if you have a weak password, it’s better if we find out about it first.

 How Not to Choose a Password

Here are some of the types of passwords that will be picked up by our crackers:

• Words in the dictionary.
• Words in any dictionary.
• Your user name.
• Your real name.
• Your spouse’s name.
• Anyone’s name (crackers don’t necessarily know that your aunt’s middle name is Agnes, but it’s easy enough to get a list of 100,000 names and try each one).
• Any word in any “cracking dictionary.” There are lists of words that crackers use to try to crack passwords: passwords that a lot of people use. Some of these lists include:Abbreviations, Asteroids, Biology, Cartoons, Character Patterns, Machine names, famous names, female names, Bible, male names, Movies, Myths-legends, Number Patterns, Short Phrases, Places, Science Fiction, Shakespeare, Songs, Sports, Surnames
• Any of the above, with a single character before or after it (“8dinner”, “happy1”).
• Any of the above, capitalized (“cat” –> “Cat”)
• Any of the above, reversed (“cat” –> “tac”), doubled (“cat” –> “catcat”) or mirrored (“cat” –> “cattac”).
• We used to tell people that taking a word and substituting some characters (a 0 (zero) for an o, or a 1 for an l) made a good password. This is no longer the case. New crackers have the capability to crack things like this, in certain situations.
• Words like “foobar”, “xyzzy” and “qwerty” are still just plain words. They are also popular passwords, and the crack programs look for them. Avoid them.
• Any of the sample passwords, good or bad, mentioned in this document.

How to Choose a Good Password

I know that coming up with a good password can be difficult, so here are some guidelines to use.

• Choose a password that is at least six characters long. This should be long enough to discourage a brute-force attack. Currently, the maximum password length on many Unix systems is eight characters, but if you want to add a few more characters to make it easier to remember, go ahead. Just bear in mind that anything after the eighth character will be ignored (so “abnormalbrain” is the same as “abnormal”).
• In general, a good password will have a mix of lower- and upper-case characters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and should be at least 6 characters long. Unfortunately, passwords like this are often hard to remember and result in people writing them down. Do not write your passwords down!
• The license plate rule: take a phrase and try to squeeze it into eight characters, as if you wanted to put it on a vanity license plate.
• Some people like to pick several small words, separated by punctuation marks of some kind.
• Put a punctuation mark in the middle of a word, e.g., “vege%tarian”.
• Use some unusual way of contracting a word. You don’t have to use an apostrophe.One of my favorite passwords was “kEp*-h&y”: “kEp” –> “keep”, “*-” –> “laser” (like those signs that you see outside of physics labs), and “h&y” –> “handy”; “Keep your laser handy!”
• You can use control characters. Just bear in mind that a lot of them have special meanings. If you use ^D, ^H or ^U, for example, you might not be able to log in again.
• Think of an uncommon phrase, and take the first, second or last letter of each word. “You can’t always get what you want” would yield “ycagwyw”. Throw in a capital letter and a puntuation mark or a number or two, and you can end up with “yCag5wyw”.
• Deliberately misspelling one or more words can make your password harder to crack.
• Use several of the techniques above.
• Something that no one but you would ever think of. The best password is one that is totally random to anyone else except you. It is difficult to tell you how to come up with these, but people are able to do it. Use your imagination!

A website is a company’s lifeblood.

But for the rest of small business owners in America, it seems, having a vibrant website is sometimes merely an afterthought.

In a study released this morning titled Casting a Wide Net: Online Activities of Small and New Businesses in the United States, Kauffman Foundation researchers compared data from the Census Bureau’s 2007 Survey of Business Owners to a data set that followed nearly 5,000 young firms that started up in 2004. The study provides one of the first in-depth looks at how small businesses—across industry sectors—are leveraging the Web to sell to customers.

Or, not leveraging the Web, as it may be. According to government data, as of 2007, only about a quarter of all small businesses in America had a website. And within that figure, only six percent reported online sales revenue.

Alicia Robb, the study’s co-auther and a senior research fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, says a particularly unexpected finding was the relatively low percentage of Web sales within the retail category. In 2004, just 2.1 percent of overall retail revenue was generated on the Internet. By 2009, that percentage hovered around 4 percent.

“It’s a tiny fraction of sales,” Robb says. “I was expecting something larger.”

Manufacturing, on the other hand, seems to be hitting its e-stride. In 2009, Web sales within manufacturing represented 42 percent of overall industry revenue.

And within nearly every vertical, Web sales are growing at a much quicker yearly pace compared to industry revenues. Web sales in manufacturing, for instance, grew 87 percent from 2004 to 2009—compared to a growth rate of just 3 percent of total manufacturing sales.

“E-commerce sales are growing much faster than overall sales.” —Alicia Robb, senior research fellow at the Kauffman Foundation

“E-commerce sales are growing much faster than overall sales,” Robb says. “It’s going to be an increasingly instrumental part of firms as they go forward, and they’ll have to have an online presence to be competitive.”

Though it’s somewhat of a no-brainer, the study confirms an often-assumed idea: young companies appreciate the need for a Web presence, and they also are more adept at selling online. Nearly a quarter of small businesses founded in 2004 that sell online said that online sales accounted for between 51 and 100 percent of their revenue, compared to just 13 percent of the rest of American small businesses.

Still, Robb says this study just scratches the surface of a subject that will become a focal point point of economic policy in the years to come.

“We hope this report will stimulate further research about these activities and their influence on our economy, as well as a serious discussion about how official statistics can be improved to allow for the study of this growing phenomenon,” Robb says.

If you hear your hard drive making some weird noises, it’s possible that it might be nearing the end of its life. With Data Cent’s bank of failing hard drive sounds, you can diagnose the most likely culprit of the problem, back up your data quickly, and take it in to see if its salvageable. Whether you’ve got a Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, or other brand drive, Data Cent probably has a recording of the sound you’re experiencing, and you can move on from there. We’ve mentioned one similar database before, but this is a bit more all-inclusive, since it adds sounds for lots of different drive brands. Hit the link to check out the database. Photo by DijutalTim. Via - Lifehacker

For better results, run the test a few times. And you can compare your speeds with friends on other ISPs, or at different times of the day, to see whether you’re getting the best value you can from your broadband subscription.

Click here to find out

Even though it’s still the new kid on the block, Google’s Chrome is rapidly becoming the standard against which other browsers are measured. Use these 10 quick tips to get the most of Chrome.

Configure Multiple Homepages

Consider yourself a power user, do you? Then why rock but a single homepage? You can configure Chrome to load multiple sites every time you open your browser. Click the Wrench icon and navigate to Tools > Basics and start adding sites. Don’t overdo it though-you’ll bog down your initial load time.

Cheat at Math

The Google Suggests feature in Chrome is your key to impressing co-workers with your unlimited knowledge of numbers. Just type your math query into the Omnibar and the answer will appear without ever having to punch the Enter key. Goodbye Windows Calculator!

Have a sneaky suspicion one of your tabs is a resource pig? You can find out which sites are dragging your browser (and your system) down. Just hit Shift+Esc to open up Chrome’s built-in Task Manager to see how much memory and CPU cycles each tab is consuming.

Test Drive Multiple Versions of Chrome

If you want access to new features before everyone else, you have to subscribe to Chrome’s Beta or Dev channel, both of which replace your stable build. Not keen with that? Try Chrome’s Canary build (http://tinyurl.com/2b2jof9). It’s the most frequently updated version of Chrome, and it installs alongside whatever other version you’re running.

Convert Webpages into App Shortcuts

App shortcuts open in a dedicated window devoid of browser buttons and are handy for frequently accessed sites, like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and, well, you get the idea. To create one, navigate to Wrench > Tools > Create application shortcuts… and punch the Create button.