Monthly Archives: June 2011

Still More Password Analysis

Posted on 2011-06-19 by jcs

Three more bloggers have weighed in with an analysis of the 62,000 passwords that LulzSec released recently. These three analyses take a look at the structure of the passwords and have some interesting details that I hadn’t seen before. Aviv … Continue reading →

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Reeder

Posted on 2011-06-18 by jcs

I follow a large number of technical blogs (emacs-fu, research!rsc, Abstract Heresies, …) and aggregators (Planet Scheme, Planet Lisp, Hacker News, …) that I read everyday and in some cases several times a day. Most of the blogs are not … Continue reading →

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Mac OS X Modifier Key Symbols

Posted on 2011-06-16 by jcs

When I first started using Macs, one of the things most confusing to me were the symbols that OS X uses on the menus to indicate the keyboard short cuts: Eventually, I learned what these symbols meant Symbol key ⌘ … Continue reading →

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Drawing Keyboard Keys

Posted on 2011-06-15 by jcs

Those of you who followed my recommendation and took at look at Xah Lee’s Increase Productivity Using Function Keys post, may have noticed some neat CSS magic that he uses when writing about keyboard keys. For example, he says that … Continue reading →

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Increased Productivity With Function Keys

Posted on 2011-06-14 by jcs

Xah Lee has a self-confessed obsession with keyboards. He’s particularly interested in their ergonomics and features that can enhance productivity. Not everyone agrees with his take on these things but his views are thoughtful and often useful. In a recent … Continue reading →

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Lisp in a Production Environment

Posted on 2011-06-12 by jcs

Over at the Symbo1ics Blog, Robert Smith has a nice post on the myth that Lisp is inappropriate in a production environment. He says that, like many others, he believed that while Lisp is flexible and expressive it would not … Continue reading →

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The Greatest Hack of All Time

Posted on 2011-06-11 by jcs

I just saw a reference to one of my favorite papers on computer security. It’s Ken Thompson’s Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. In it he describes what the Jargon File calls a truly moby hack: the insertion of … Continue reading →

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iMessages

Posted on 2011-06-09 by jcs

Now that the excitement over the WWDC Keynote has died down, people are beginning to think about the new features and what they will mean. One interesting take on that is that iMessages is really a very disruptive technology. There … Continue reading →

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Encrypting (Some) Dropbox Files

Posted on 2011-06-08 by jcs

A while ago I wrote about the developing ‘scandal’ involving Dropbox’s supposed admission that they could read your data. As I remarked at the time, no one with an ounce of sense ever thought otherwise but the question did remain … Continue reading →

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More Password Analysis

Posted on 2011-06-07 by jcs

A week ago I wrote about the analysis of the Gawker passwords. Now Troy Hunt has provided a similar analysis based on the SonyPictures.com compromise. He looked at 37,608 accounts from the LulzSec torrent and analyzed the passwords for Length … Continue reading →

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