Password Security - How Secure are You?Written by Pencil Dude
Passwords - we use them every day, here in cyberland. They're used as first step in identifying ourselves. Yes, we're allowed to logon to this network, because we have pre-approved password. They're necessary for our online banking transactions and our online bill payments. Or yes, we're allowed to read this ebook, because we've purchased it and here's our authentication.There's almost a gazillion instances where we use passwords but most of us don't think about how easy it is for our lives to be broken into because we chose such an easy password. A recent survey reported by BBC suggests that more than half of computer users never change their passwords, and many use words that can be easily guessed. Common Passwords: 23% child's name 19% partner's name 12% birthdays 9% football team 9% celebrities and bands 9% favorite places 8% own name 8% pet's name In my experience, other passwords that are common in North America include: - Mother's Maiden Name - Social Insurance Number or Social Security Number (SIN, SSN)* - Favorite Colour/Color - The person's name and current year * Before I go any further, I should stress that using ANY of those ideas as a password is an extremely bad security risk. Furthermore, use of your SIN or SSN is particularly foolish as that can lead to identity theft. In U.S. alone, this problem is estimated to be somewhere around 700,000 to 750,000 victims a year. The problem with using such easy common names for passwords is that hackers, and identity thieves have special programs, much like dictionaries that go through all of obvious common names, phrases and variations; they also go through dictionary itself, including "foreign" language dictionaries. Sooner or later, they'll get a hit - and BINGO they're in and can do whatever it is that they want to do.
| | What's With All Those Error Messages?Written by Stephen Bucaro
---------------------------------------------------------- Permission is granted for below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and byline, copyright, and resource box below is included. ---------------------------------------------------------- What's With All Those Error Messages? By Stephen Bucaro Your software application pops up an error message with some cryptic message like "Unexpected Application Error", "General Protection Fault" or "Illegal Operation". You don't have a clue as to what message means. Illegal Operation! What did you do wrong? YOU didn't do anything wrong. Somewhere along line a programmer did something wrong. In this article, I'm going to give you some insight into those cryptic error messages. General Protection Fault (GPF) Each application running on your computer stakes out a 4GB area of memory to park itself and all of it's data. All other applications (including other instances of same application) are forbidden from using that memory area. If an application tries to store something in another applications memory area - BAM! General Protection Fault! GPFs can be caused by operating systems overcomplicated memory management scheme. To understand how complicated that scheme is, realize that your computer may not even have 4GB of memory and hard disk space combined, but you can still run multiple applications that each think they have 4GB of memory to work with. That's real smoke and mirrors! As complicated as that scheme is, GPFs are rarely caused by operating system. That's because every operating system uses same time tested and proven memory management scheme. GPFs are usually caused by an application programmers coding error. Here are some other possible causes of GPFs. * Bad memory chip * Failing hard disk * Computer overheating Illegal Operation This error is not caused by an illegal operation by you. Your application tried to perform an illegal operation. One example of an illegal operation is "divide by zero". Enter a number in your calculator and then divide it by zero. Your calculator will display message "Error". It's illegal to divide a number by zero. Somewhere in applications sequence of operation, a mathematical operation resulted in a value of zero. The programmer didn't test for this before they used number as divisor in another mathematical operation. Result, Illegal Operation! There are many other possible illegal operations. An Illegal Operation error is almost always result of a programmer's error. Unexpected Application Error (UAE) When a programmer creates code for an application to write to a file, they must first put code to "open" file. If an application tries to write to a file without opening it first, you get message "Unexpected Application Error". There are many other possible UAEs. An UAE is almost always result of a programmers error.
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