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.