Far too many people still use easy-to-guess passwords. Admittedly, keeping track of multiple passwords for every occasion is difficult, but at least one’s universal password should not be easily guessable!

A lot of people like KeePass (portable) to securely manage their passwords, though I have my own system.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”

Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

…

Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou…  The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it.

…

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

One commenter also suggested this tool:  http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

Tech site Ars Technica saw a university study reporting that photos and other images posted by Facebook, MySpace, and other social network users are often left on those services’ servers long after the posters hit “delete.” They put that finding to the test. Images posted to Flickr and Twitter were immediately gone upon refreshing, but images could still be found on Facebook and MySpace’s servers two months later, with both companies saying the issue was one of third-party server response. Anyone who can grab a direct link, in other words, can get at your stuff long after you want it gone. Need some web reputation triage? Break out the web Band-Aids and get to managing your online reputation.

via Lifehacker – Your Deleted Social Network Pics Are Probably Still There – Facebook.

A lot of people, including myself, often overlook the importance of managing their online identity.  A friend teaching school thought no one would ever find his blog, as he blogged anonymously, but it ended up being the second search result for his name in Google.

I have an obvious web presence tracking spots across various sites I’ve registered for at some time or another.  With a little bit of work, you could probably even track down those sites that don’t personally identify me as I haven’t historically been very careful in keeping my handles private.  It’s a shame, since, once they’re out there, there’s not too much you can do to prevent a persistent person from finding you.  For example, that same friend’s web site from high school on an ISP long gone is still available via the web archive.

So, I’ve settled with the goal of simply not making my associations too obvious– I don’t link my various blogs one to the other.

6/23/2009 03:37:00 PM

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we’ve identified some performance best practices that we’d like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.

We are excited to discuss what we’ve learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:

• Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.

• In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.

• Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!’s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.

• While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC’s decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.

via Official Google Blog: Let’s make the web faster.

Sounds good to me. I’m going to look into that google speed page and the YSlow and  Page Speed applications.