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.

Can Your Laptop Do This?

It’d be cool if mine could.

Prius Hearses

A Japanese limousine company plans to make a Prius Hearse model.  If you have $80,000 to spend, you can look into getting one here.

(via Boing Boing)

Outre Art

Computer-generated images of fetal animals.  More here.

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.

Should We Say Goodbye To Our Television Sets?

An interesting piece on the changing landscape of television consumption.

According to comScore, a Reston-based research firm, online video viewing increased 42 percent last year, about 10 times the growth rate of TV viewing. The biggest winner in this trend may be Hulu.com, which shows programs from its parent companies, Fox, NBC and ABC, and other providers. Started just 13 months ago, Hulu ranks second (after YouTube) among video-watching sites, says comScore.

I rarely watch programming on an actual television set.  The television I do watch I experience on my notebook, using either Hulu or iTunes.  If I do get a television for when I move back to Richmond, it will be only to watch DVD’s (although I’m now more comfortable watching movies on my notebook of late).

One of the social effects of  television in the 1950′s was that people across the country stopped what they were doing and surrounded the family set to watch along with millions of other people simultaneously.  David Halberstam wrote in his book, The Fifties, that, “Studies showed that when a popular program was on, toilets flushed all over certain cities, as if on cue, during commercials or the moment the program was over.”

Now very few (mostly young) people want their schedule altered to accommodate television programming (I can’t remember the last time I avoided going out so to avoid missing a show).  Just as the article points out, Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new water cooler, where people exchange their thoughts and opinions.  As more and more have access to broadband internet speeds, we should expect further increases in online viewing, as well as dustier television sets.

Twitter As A Legitimate Form Of Human Expression?

Ezra Klein tackles the question.

Twitter, like blogs, democratizes access to the means of recognition. It’s not so much that people want to be watched as that they want to be seen. People — including, sadly, me — mock all the trivia that makes it onto Twitter — “I’m at the gym, and hate the elliptical machine!” — but that stuff isn’t trivia to the people experiencing it. It’s the stuff of life. And the ability to share it helps to make it matter.

I’m a Twitting neophyte, having purposefully avoided the service to refrain from cramming bandwidth with my rather trifling existence.  However, like Klein points out, there’s something liberating in expressing oneself, even with the most banal of circumstances.  Humans are an expressive animal, and Twitter brilliantly capitalizes on this.  I’m hooked.

Technology Driven Dating

How do Facebook, Twitter, and texting enter into the fray?

Today, you can be a phone person, an e-mail person, a text person, a Skype person, a Facebook wall person, a Twitter person, an instant-messaging person, or you can just stare creepily into your webcam like that manga girl on YouTube.  Each form of communication has its own followers and rules, which means dating today is a law of inverse proportions: As ways to communicate increase, the chances you will date someone who speaks your technological language decrease.

I’m an introvert (and have never been oratorical), so I’m more comfortable with texting, but I understand the importance of actually talking with someone, especially if one is in a long-distance relationship.  I think the many ways one can communicate with others is a good thing, if not nuanced.

Twitter: A Primer

Care of John Dickerson:

1. It feels good when I stop: You don’t have to sign up for Twitter. If you do, don’t follow boring people if you don’t want to be bored.

2. Meet the audience: I linked to an amazing NYT slide show of an ambush in Afghanistan. The wife of one of the soldiers responded and I back.

3. Many people you’ve heard of are boring. People you’ve never heard of aren’t.

4. The swarm poetry of all this Twittering can be charming. One string of words, “stoked tattoo teabag tears,” may also be in a Tom Waits song.

5. The time I spend with Twitter shrinks because of the books, music, writing, podcasts, and other things I’ve learned about on Twitter.

I’m the newest congregant on the Twitter bandwagon.  Before joining, I was skeptical of its merit (why would keeping constant tab on other people be worth my time?).  Although I still consider it a novelty, I’ve found it to be a convenient way to expose others to information, such as music, links, books, articles, etc.