Funk Babblings

Lately I've been trying to catch up on the podcasts I'm most interested in, since I'd gotten about eight months behind. One of my favorites (and one of the first I ever found) is Insomnia Radio, featuring indie rock (and anything related) and focusing on the music rather than (like too many podcasts) the host. Over the past couple years he's been branching out to invite and encourage people in many different cities to start podcasts under the Insomnia Radio umbrella, primarily focusing on music of their local region. So for example there's Insomnia Radio New York, Insomnia Radio Cincinnati, and so on, as well as a few genre-based shows.

Yesterday (now up to April's podcasts) I learned that there's now Insomnia Radio Turkey!

There are only five episodes so far, with 4-5 songs each, and there were many months between episodes #4 and #5, but I enjoyed listening to them all.

When I started using computer networks in the early 90s, I had a six-character password. A few years later the recommendation was a minimum of eight characters, and be sure to mix it up with upper/lower-case, numbers, and maybe some punctuation.

Unfortunately way too many people still haven't even gotten that message; as a network administrator (who tries to avoid knowing people's passwords but somehow does anyway since they don't seem to care) I see some amazingly simple passwords.

Even more unfortunately, some software enforces less-than-good passwords by restricting the punctuation or the password length.

But with the guidelines of a decade ago, it's been generally assumed that brute-forcing a password would take many months at least. However, that assumed that the job would be done on a single CPU. Or possibly much faster on a massively-distributed network on CPUs, but that's still a lot of effort for a few passwords, and apparently less interesting or lucrative than searching for aliens or sending spam.

Who expected cracking a password to be done on a graphics card? In less than a week?

So basically the eight-character password has been cracked. But the 12-character password will still present a challenge for a while, even if you don't include the punctuation and numbers and all that.... though you still might be vulnerable to a dictionary attack if you're not careful.