This particular article sprung pretty much fully formed from an XKCD comic. It’s the one called “Password Strength” and talks about password entropy and about choosing a password by selecting four separate words at random. I’m sure my readers, sophisticated souls that they are, already know of it. […]
READ MOREPossibly a rather lightweight topic this one, but at the time (and frankly since) it was certainly in the news. The topic? Websites getting hacked, having customer data downloaded, including passwords. Sometimes the hacks are really simple, and I talk about a couple in the article: SQL Injection (which, even after all this time, is still one of the primary ways to hack a website) and XSS (cross-site scripting). Sometimes users bring the problems upon themselves by, say, having the same passwords for several sites (your password then is only as safe as the security at the weakest site). I also talk about the need to salt-and-hash passwords in your database if you are a website developer, and the need to use a good password manager if you are a user. […]
READ MOREI finally got round to reading the Christmas edition of PC Plus this evening and was pleasantly surprised to see that someone had written in about a recent article of mine: 10 mistakes every programmer makes. It’s going to be next year before I republish it here in this hallowed blog, but you can read it over at TechRadar.com right now. […]
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