Password Science 301 - Attacker tricks

In my last two posts (Password Science 101 and Password Science 201), I talked about password security from an introductory view, and hit on some of the math involved.

In this post, I'll talk a little bit about shortcuts that make the math easier, and talk about some of the actual techniques attackers use to attack passwords more efficiently. This isn't designed to be a comprehensive how-to for attackers to crack passwords. It's mainly designed to help the slightly math savvy and curious average person understand a little bit about the mindset of attacking a password.

Password Science - 201, the intermediate view

In Password Science 101, I gave a quick, very beginner introduction about what every person with a password can do to make a difference in security.

This post will be a longer post that talks a little more about the math and how it works, so that you can get a glimpse into the mind of an attacker and what an attacker sees when they want a password.

Password Science 101 - Password security for Everyone

There's always a lot of press coverage about passwords whenever someone gets hacked.

Since passwords are something that everyone has some personal control over, it's a worthy message to put out there. That's right. You can make a direct difference to the security of your banking information, your credit card number, or your dirty secrets on the Internet. But how?

This blog post will give you 5 easy tips you can use with your passwords to personally make a difference in online security.

It's all about the man purse

At this point, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that cell phones and tablets will ultimately merge into a single device, and that it will take over the role of the Roku and DVR as entertainment providers adapt to the online single-show/single-series subscriber models with devices like Chromecast bridging the gap between tiny screens and larger entertainment center experiences. More frightening is the idea that these will become the new house keys and primary home provisioning devices. Right now, people have coined the term "phablet" to describe this bizarre hybrid device, but I don't think that term is broad enough to describe what this will actually become.

The New MacBook Pro

My old 17" MBP gave up the ghost recently. I had reached 98% capacity in my 120 GB drive, and my VMs were dying with Snow Leopard with only 2 GB of RAM. This was the max at the time that the model supported.

I found out from iFixit that my model could upgrade to 6 GB of memory with a manual repair. So, I did that. Then I bought a 500 GB internal drive, and put it all together. Then the logic board died. It's about $900 to replace the logic board, and even then, it's likely only a refurb.

So, I went out to look at a new Mac. Here's what I found.

This is not a hard core hardware review of the new Mac. I don't have that info. But, here are my consumer thoughts - price, upgradability, features.