Every now and then a popular website gets hacked and tons of user passwords are published for everyone to see. On one side, it can potentially lead to huge losses to the users whose passwords have been compromised. On the other, security analysts use the data to gain various insights.
In one such recent attack, Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security, came to a few startling conclusions based on the passwords published showing what should not be your password:

16% of passwords matched a person’s first name
14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard
4% are variations of the word “password”
5% of …read more

Jason was kind enough to accept my guest posts for his blogs Microsoft Weblog and Uncover the Internet. These are my first guest posts ever: one about Microsoft’s involvement with Open Source and another about watching movies legally on Youtube. I hope you enjoy them.

I am two days late, but never mind. Lifehacker, the fabulous site with everyday tips and downloads for getting things done, had its first post on 31st Jan 2005. What a phenomenal success it has achieved in these four years!
On this occasion, the super blog has two interesting posts: Our Best Posts From 2005 to 2009, and Weirdest and Most Controversial Posts.
I am especially thankful to Gina Trapani, the blog’s founding editor, for introducing me to Cygwin and the todo.sh. She used to make frequent posts but has been writing only a weekly column on the blog these days. …read more

I’ve realized that my last Tech Channel Roundup was nearly a month ago and I’m guilty of it. So, bear with me as I overload you with a number of interesting links that I found in some of the sister blogs.
Milo discovered a product especially useful for enterprises of all sizes called Nightwatchman, a good news that Microsoft didn’t lay off anybody in the Vista team. I knew that they didn’t touch the Silverlight team, but frankly I’m surprised about this because Vista hasn’t been very profitable to Microsoft. Or has it? One bad news is the Windows 7 minimum …read more

Gmail is a pretty good mail service provided by Google which strives towards accurately catching spam, and is very successful in catching the phish. One thing that empowers the people behind Gmail is the volumes that Google sees.
The Google Enterprise Mail is apparently a much-in-demand service too and it has a Google Enterprise “spam squad” who welcome spam so as to analyze and counter them. Nearly a month after the new year started, they have posted a retrospective post “2008: The Year in Spam” which you may go through if you have time. Otherwise this summary will suffice.
Closing the McColo Network …read more

For the first time, Symantec Corp. publicly released a detailed report of its findings about the “Underground Economy” (cyberworld) through its observations between July 2007 and June 2008. Though this report was released nearly two months ago, I came across it only now.
Read the Symantec Report on the Underground Economy or listen to the corresponding Symantec podcast by Zulfikar Ramzan, the Security Technology & Response Technical Director.
Symantec estimates the value of total advertised goods on the underground servers as up to $276 Million and this figure is from only the underground they had access to. Mr. Ramzan said in the …read more

Wikipedia, the world’s free encyclopedia, is celebrating its seventh birthday today. Even though it existed a little before Jan 15, 2001, it was formally launched only on that day. Wikipedia is a multilingual project with currently over 12 million articles. All articles can be viewed and edited by anyone who have access to the website.
I use Wikipedia as much as I use Google, and often visit the site directly for certain kinds of information, before searching it elsewhere. Even though it is constantly criticized for articles especially about various historical events and personalities, it is resourceful in succinctly providing valuable …read more

McAfee provides a nice add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer called Site Advisor. I used to run McAfee Site Advisor v2.8 until recently. It identifies whether a site or a search result is safe to its knowledge or not and is one of the best add-ons to use in a cyber café.
Do not make the mistake of installing it or upgrading it now.
Firefox’s “Find Updates” in Tools –> Add-ons could not find the latest version 2.9 just like the Mozilla Add-ons website couldn’t recommend it because Site Advisor is not your normal .XPI add-on. One has to download and …read more

The last year can also be called “the year of Twitter”. The micro-blogging social media tool where each user answers the question, “What are you doing?” has gone viral so much so that there have been a billion tweets in 2.5 years since its launch. Latest news is breaking through Twitter already and the Internet dictionary put on a few pounds thanks to Twitter. At a time when the Twitterverse is speculating about whether Twitter would monetize or not, it is natural for miscreants to take advantage of Twitter to make some money themselves.
Here are three problems all twitter users are …read more

Google returns 497,000 results for the search “Microsoft jokes”. It is justified by experiences like this. I haven’t tried Windows Live Writer until recently. It is a wonderful blogging software that makes lives of bloggers simpler, but installing it can be a daunting task.
A search for “Live Writer” in the Microsoft Download Center took me to this page. It is an old page from which I downloaded the 2.3MB installer and tried to install the required software. Thrice. It gave me hell, with the installation hanging at 99% each time.
I then googled for a direct setup file of Live Writer …read more