What a great article by Eddie Smith. In one post he discusses psychology, numerology, security and 1Password.
Practical implementations of the “magical number seven” can be found throughout modern society, the most common example being phone number formats (###-####).
From AgileBits:
The bottom line is that I am recommending that 1Password users not be early adopters of this .
It’s great that Dropbox is getting serious about security, but to my recollection their biggest security breaches had nothing to do with user authentication. Sure, there were smaller breaches caused by reusing passwords, but the biggest were self inflicted by Dropbox.
I use the hell out of my Dropbox account and I’m glad they are really focusing on security.
Want to figure out how much it will cost to retrieve a backup from Amazon’s new Glacier service? So simple:
Next we subtract your free allowance from the peak hourly retrieval for the month. To determine the amount of data you get for free, we look at the amount of data retrieved during your peak day and calculate the percentage of data that was retrieved during your peak hour. We then multiply that percentage by your free daily allowance.
Since Mat Honan’s worst-day, I’ve seen several posts about backups. Shawn Blanc wrote a nice summary of his system. I think he is 2/3 to a good system.1 I’ll offer up the advice I give to anyone that will listen.
Online backups are nice, but nothing beats an offsite physical backup.
I’ve written about my backup OCD before and not much has changed.
The Cloud I’ve tried all of the major online backup services.
The bill also "elevates" the IP attaches out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, and sets them up as their own agency, including a new role: the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. Yes, we'll get another IP Czar, this time focused in the Commerce Department.
There is nothing about this that surprises me. I predict that every bit of SOPA will still be enacted. Corporations have paid good money for their shills in congress and they damn well expect some results.
According to the report, the number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year. This is not to diminish the real--albeit shrinking--threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the 13,000 killed and over 45,000 injured around the world. For Americans, however, it should emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions.
On Friday, the WordPress instance that Macdrifter was sitting on was subject to a WordPress vulnerability. I was lucky since I had already been working on moving off of WordPress. I was able to undo the malicious WordPress code within a few minutes.
My WordPress installation is self hosted and I was on the latest version. I also use very few plugins, which are a common vector for exploits. I was able to bring back WordPress by doing the following:
How is this stuff a surprise to anyone? Startups slurp at the great teat of the social-graph and make a business off of people self identifying their most damning weaknesses.1 Who's surprised that all of this data can be connected to form a highly detailed profile of an individual's lifestyle? There should also be no surprises when the aggregated data is misinterpreted in a way that is dangerous or costly to the consumer.
Go check your Mac updates. If you have ever used GoToMeeting or similar, then you have Java installed. Let's be safe out there kids.
By way of TUAW
I received an email from Eric Warnke at Backup Box a little while ago mentioning their new service. Backup Box is a general backup service for online resources. It can backup a Web site or FTP, GitHub, etc. to Dropbox, FTP, GitHub, etc. It's not a real time sync, but rather a scheduled backup. It's kind of like Ifttt but designed specifically for backups between online services. It looks very cool and I'm just now starting to play with it.
