Category: Computers

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Stupid Password Requirements

The most stupid password requirement I met this year.
I’m sorry I can’t recall the site it came from.

Minimum 8 characters
Maximum 32 characters
At least 1 Lowercase letter (a-z)
At least 1 Uppercase letter (A-Z)
At least 1 Number (0-9)

Now then what should a password be made off?

If you search the internet for that, you come across many different statements. But as far as I know, there is only oen good rule. Make you password as long as possible, then it’s harder to do a brute force attack on it.

There are people saying things like

Make up a sentence you can easily remember, take the first letter of every word in the sentence, and include apunctuation or turn numbers into digits for variety. Then ‘I have two kids: Jack and Jill.’  would become Ih2k:JaJ

Queen Sylvanas, would turn in here grave if she wasn’t undead already. You’re better off using the sentence then the ‘shortened’ version. If it comes to attacking your account (not by social engineering that’s a whole other story)  which one would be the first to be found? the shortest one of course.

There for as a programmer or architect you should seriously reconsider if you have limits like your password can only be 32 characters long. At least 256! People should be able to wirte a book as password. A book they remember, they know by hearth.

As a user of a website or service you should complain if you get stupid password requirements! Ask for the possibility of something long with any character you like. Not with obligatory weird character and punctuation marks, they are just fooling you that you are more secure with a password of 8 chars and a number…

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My Wireless D-LINK Router freaked out

After flashing my mobile HTC Wildfire with Cyanogen 7 mod – Android 2.3.7, which is really nice by the way, works faster than HTC’s own Android 2.2.1 build, the only thing I had to do was flash a separate update for the mobile’s wifi/gps/3g connection, GPS wasn’t working. But at home where I’m using a DIR-615 a D-LINK router with b/g/n Wifi and 4 10/100Mbps ports the mobile didn’t get an internet connection through the Wifi. Or it did, but lost it regularly, or was connected to the Wifi but didn’t get internet.

So I thought perhaps the transmit power of my router is not good enough. I had set it on the lowest transmit power upon it’s first connection. And thus I increased the transmit power to medium. Yihaa, my mobile connected properly. Case solved and dismissed!

At least that’s what I thought. The day after I noticed both of my laptops internet was really slow. I speed tested from one laptop to another, that was fine. Internet still slow. Started to suspect a dropout on the providers network. But that seemed fine too. I rebooted my router, my internet cable connection, and oh! internet was back. For 5 minutes, then the connection dropped again to 0.5kbps download and 5kpbs upload.

After digging up a cable from the cellar and connecting that I noticed that a wired connection did not suffer from speed issues. (The same counts for the HTC, did’t seem to suffer from bandwidth drop, which is weird)

Then I remembered that I changed the D-LINKs transmit power from low to medium. I thought, no that can’t be it, but it’s the only thing I changed, so I proceeded. Set the transmit power back to low. And yes, both of the laptops suddenly had full WiFi bandwidth again.

I would have never suspected that when connection on low power is fine, it is not fine on higher power.

Accoring to the manual:

Transmit Power
Normally the wireless transmitter operates at 100% power. In some circumstances, however, there might be a need to isolate specific frequencies to a smaller area. By reducing the power of the radio, you can prevent transmissions from reaching beyond your corporate/home office or designated wireless area.

What does that have to do with the bandwidth?

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0x20 – newline

NewLine is a small conference organised by the hackerspace in Ghent to celebrate their first year of existence.

Things picked up on NewLine worth to visit or test.

Loadays – Linux open admin days

Tor – what is tor: a solution for not being seen on the internet. Tor was started by the us navy with the intent of more anonymity for their spies. You can setup a node to join the tor network. Tor is a socks proxy interface but a proxy alone is not enough, there still are cookies etc. But the tor network routes your traffic encrypted through at least 3 nodes. To setup your box to.use tor, you have to setup a proxy to connect all connections to tor. To be truly secure also a web proxy that filters http headers ( pollipo ) and set your dns’s to pass dns request also through the tor network is required. There also is a FireFox extensions to setup your FireFox settings the right way for tor.

Mesh networking. Routing different wireless networks to make one big network. Around Barcelona the people in towns use wifree (wi-free?) a mesh routing network for connecting to the internet because the ADSL is to slow. There is a network like this in Gent.

Some pictures:
Continue reading “0x20 – newline”

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