Creating Secure Passwords

I admit I’m not good when it comes to this. Remembering my many logins and passwords can be a bit daunting, and I’m more concerned about me remembering my many passwords than I am with others deciphering them. But here’s a quick and easy way to come up with one:

Start with an original but memorable phrase. For this exercise, let’s use these two sentences: I like to eat bagels at the airport and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota. The phrase can have something to do with your life or it can be a random collection of words—just make sure it’s something you can remember. That’s the key: Because a mnemonic is easy to remember, you don’t have to write it down anywhere. (If you can’t remember it without writing it down, it’s not a good mnemonic.) This reduces the chance that someone will guess it if he gets into your computer or your e-mail. What’s more, a relatively simple mnemonic can be turned into a fanatically difficult password.

Which brings us to Step 2: Turn your phrase into an acronym. Be sure to use some numbers and symbols and capital letters, too. I like to eat bagels at the airport becomes Ilteb@ta, and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota is M1stCwarlsIbaT.

The Future of Book Banning and Ownership

When we purchase a physical copy of a book, it’s ours. For life. But, in the age of digital acquisition and libraries, taking this notion for granted may not play out.

Amazon Kindle users who owned digital copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm had those titles removed from their libraries last week. Without their consent. The reason, according to Amazon, was that the titles had been mistakenly published. Users who had those titles removed were give a full refund.

This may all seem like a consumer-related trifle, but Farhad Manjoo sees the broader implications upon the horizon:

As our media libraries get converted to 1′s and 0′s, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.

The rules are completely different online. When you buy a Kindle a book, you’re implicitly agreeing to Amazon’s Kindle terms of service. The contract gives the company “the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.” In Amazon’s view, the books you buy aren’t your property—they’re part of a “service,” and Amazon maintains complete control of that service at all times. Amazon has similar terms covering downloadable movies and TV shows, as does Apple for stuff you buy from iTunes.

Who Makes People More Informed: Print or New Media?

Slate wonders who is the more informed consumer of news, those that rely on tangible newspapers or the online variety.

Starting Tuesday, Slate will be conducting a highly unscientific experiment. For three days, two (mostly) newspaper journalists will return to the time (now 15 years ago) when if you wanted to read the news (as opposed to watching it on television), you had to buy a physical object called a newspaper. They will each spend no more than an hour every day reading whatever English-language papers are available where they live. And, of course, they won’t be allowed to read any news, even if gathered by a bona-fide newspaper, online. [emphasis mine]

For the same three days, another team of two (mostly) Web journalists—Emily Yoffe (aka Prudence) and Seth Stevenson, both of Slate, will get all their news from the Web. The trick, of course, will be to exclude Web sites that are primarily shovelware (newspaper material dumped unchanged onto a Web site) or aggregation (sites or site features that strain the limits of fair use in order to summarize what’s in newspapers).

Book News

- Looks like Washington, D.C. will be getting a new book store when Kultura comes back in July after trying to make it in Santa Monica, CA.  Owners say D.C. is an “information town.”

- A rundown of the most notable examples of the ménage à trois in literature, which includes an purposefully uncompleted novel by Ernest Hemingway.

- And the classics are going to be twitterfied when Twitterature launches in the fall:

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature – they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling – into 20 tweets or less – that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The Past Comes Alive. Then Tweets.

World War II propaganda posters mix with New Media.

More here.

Hoekstra Becomes a Meme

Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra recently tweeted: “Iranian Twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in House.”

The gross exaggeration prompted this website.  A few examples after the jump.

Anonymous Confessions

Group Hug collects and shares them.  Some are funny; some saddening.

Sexting: Uncovered

An Atlanta Fox News station is on the case with a list of 50 of the most important acronyms used in sexting:

A few:

DUM – Do you masterbate?

NIFOC – Nude in front of computer

IMEZRU – I’m easy, are you?

For You Twits Out There

An interesting article on twittering efficaciously.

“There has to be something useful and fundamentally unselfish about a good tweet,” says Laura Fitton, author of “Twitter for Dummies”… who as Pistachio has 30,000 followers on Twitter.  The best tweets, Fitton says, provide more value to the reader than to the person writing it.

The most compelling tweets aren’t the ones that merely answer “What are you doing?” but rather the ones that create ripples throughout the online community. They prompt discussion, self-reflection and philosophizing — if of the dime-store variety.