Troy Hunt (of Have I Been Pwned) has made his collection of 306 million pawned hashes available online with a detailed explanation of the collection of the broken passwords, the sources and a general run through of NIST suggested strategies to make you passwords more safe.
For the inpatient ones the simple approach is to go straight for the checker and see if your password has already been pawned. My current password pass the test, but a worrying amount of my older and simpler passwords are all positive as pawned. Continue reading “Do you have one of the 306,000,000 passwords already hacked?”
Day: August 4, 2017
Mozilla’s plans to fight Chrome (and survive)
I have been a fan of Mozilla’s Firefox sine the start. Their early adaptions of plug-ins gave a level of control no other browser offered. Controlling scripts and flash, managing cookies and trackers have all been useful. It did however over time become a resource hog, and it’s market penetration has been in free fall lately. A special report on C-Net looks at how Mozilla in November, with the release of Firefox 57, intends to go to war with Google Chrome to regain its lost market share.
An uphill struggle no doubt, but 57 looks like it contains a lot of issues addressed that has led me to also use Chrome for easy internet tasks. I will join the beta program once available and will post my opinions after using it for a while.
Microsoft Eye Control for Windows 10
A challenge raised to Microsoft first Hackathon from Steve Gleason (Ex NFL Player with ALS) to find a solution for ALS sufferers to access and use computers, in particular in the advanced stages of ALS where eye control is the only bodily function still under the patients control. A hack team under the moniker “Ability Eye Gaze” took on the challenge and ended up demoing a fully functional wheelchair completely managed by your eyes.
Satya Nadella announced the project as the winner of the 2014 Hackathon. When the core windows team looked closer at the design an team was assigned to look at the feasibility of implementing it in Windows as a standard feature.
At the start of this years Hackathon Satya announced that the solution has been integrated into Windows 10 as “Eye Control” and is targeted for release in this years Fall Update. Requires fairly specialized HW to work, but has a lot of potential. Combine this with voice control, and we are one step closer to dumping our Keyboards snf Mouses.
Who will pay for the cost of the new Hi-Def Video Codecs?
Dan Rayburn (of Frost & Sulivan) has just written an interesting blog entry on Streaming Media about the impacts of Apple supporting H265 from High Sierra and the Google V9 codec market adaptation (and coming high end Codecs). He makes a theoretical calculation (heavily argued over in the comment section) on the costs for the Steamers of upgrading their front ends to handle the increased processing needs for these and future codecs. The suggested conclusion of a worst case cost increase of 50.0000% seems excessive (and is argued over) but as a user of x265 I can vouch for the impacts on the clients, my CPU loads are rarely under 90% across all cores when playing high end x265 files. It is a worthwhile thing to think about, in particular when 4K + resolutions are becoming more common. It is also worth contemplating that the cost will (one way or another) come back to the consumer. What we gain in less bandwidth we will most likely pay for in the cost of more processing from the streamers and providers.
Intel’s Coffee Lake CPU’s will not work with today’s Z270 Motherboards
PC World quotes a tweet reply from Asrok confirming that the Coffeee Lake CPU’s will not be compatible with the current Z270 motherboards. This does not impact consumers directly, but has a massive impact on home builders and the need to update to a Z370 motherboards for further CPU upgrades. Nice, if true, for AMD and their new Ryzen CPU’s that works with the z270 boards. Is AMD coming back as a contender?
Google puts another bid for Snapchat
You may remember that in 2011 Google offered to buy Snapchat for 3 Billion USD and was rejected. According to Techcruch Goggle are again proposing to acquire Snapchat, this time for 30 Billion USD, to pre-empt the pending Snapchat IPO. Thats 60% of the current market value of General Motors for a company that has yet to produce a profit. I get flashbacks to the AOL – Time Warner merger, and hope this one turns out better!