Some interesting links I encountered over the last few months, between the time I stopped importing Twitter digests and the time I started using them for linkblogging.
Tag: linkblogging
1…2…3…4…5.
If Your Password is “123456”, Just Make it “HackMe” (New York Times). Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the most common are…well…pathetic. Things like “123456” (the most common), “abc123”, “password” and even “rockyou” (seriously!)
There’s been some slight improvement in the past decade, when the most common password was “12345” (the kind of combination an idiot has on his luggage). Now it’s got a whole extra digit. (Whee.)
Hmm, I wonder where “Chuck Norris” appears on the list?
(via @dixonium)
Myth-Quotations
Myth Adventures, Phil Foglio’s comic-book adaptation of Robert Asprin’s fantasy/comedy novel, Another Fine Myth, is being serialized as a free webcomic [Edit: no longer available.], in the same format as Girl Genius. I remember spending a lot of effort tracking down the mid-1980s books on eBay, before they finally reissued the collection.
The title of that first novel was originally going to be Another Fine Mess, from the Laurel and Hardy catch-phrase, but someone misheard it and Robert Asprin decided he liked that version better. It turns out that “Another fine mess” is actually a misquote itself, according to this the New York Times article on why we misquote movies (via @johannadc). It was originally “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Link: Fandom – There’s more than one way to do it
Worth remembering: Your fandom is not Fandom, by schmevil.
…everybody does fandom differently. Fandom is not fanworks fandom. It is not media fandom, SF fandom, or whatever fandom. It is all of these things and more. There exist fandoms and ways of doing fandom that you have never heard of. Fandom is mindbogglingly huge and varied – I’m constantly discovering new fandoms, and new fannish activities. All of these ways of doing Fandom are valid.
Y2K10
1. SpamAssassin has been marking mail from 2010 as “grossly in the future.” It’s been fixed in the beta for months, but they issued an emergency update over the holiday. Of course, if they’d done the test by using math instead of pattern matching, it wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. (via Pobox)
2. A 2010 bug has caused problems with German credit cards. It seems we got complacent after Y2K and stopped worrying about date changes.
Links: Reading on the Rise & Bogus Forwards
It turns out that in the digital age, the average American reads three times as many words today as thirty years ago.
Medal of Honor recipient Ed Freeman has been co-opted by a political disinformation campaign. Remember: any time you receive a political email that asks you to forward it to everyone you know, check the facts first!
(Both via This Is True)
Manic Monday
First, some linkblogging…
- The Spam Primer has been “completely revamped.”
- Mars Express Orbiter catches video of moons Phobos and Deimos.
And then the “fun” started.
- Me: I’m going to focus on project X today!
Computer needed for project X: I’m going to lock up today!
Me: Argh! - Someone thought it would be a good idea to cover “Wonderful Christmastime?” 😯 (For the record: Shazam says it was Hilary Duff.)
- OK, after 3½ hours stuck at 74%, I think I can assume chkdsk is stalled. *grumble*
- Ate some blackberries I’d forgotten about from a week ago. Good news: I only threw out 1! Bad news: I should’ve thrown out 2. Blech!
- Chkdsk round 3 is at 55% on Stage 5 of 5. Going to call it a night & hope my PC runs tomorrow. (According to Facebook, this posted at 5:55pm!)
Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project!