The Tech Blog of Ken

Generate ultra-secure passwords for your wireless router

Steve Gibson, of Security Now! fame, has a very simple and useful "Ultra High Security Password Generator" on his web site for generating random password strings. Great for generating strong passwords for your home wireless router.

A good but low-tech way of remembering this password is to simply write it on a Post-It note and stick it to the bottom of your router, along with the router password. You rarely have to reenter your wireless password anyway, unless you have a lot of people with laptops coming over to your house all the time.

Security Now! continues to be a must-listen podcast for anyone who is remotely interested in Internet security (that should be you, fair reader). Steve does a great job of explaining complex security principles in plain language. I think I'm fairly knowledgeable about network security, but I still learn something new in every episode.

cool Google trick - find flights

I just randomly discovered that you can use Google to quickly search for flights. Just enter the two airports separated by a dash (or even better, the airport codes), and Google will generate text fields with some default dates, or you can enter your own in the search string. Then you can click the links to the different airfare search engines. Easy.

Technorati Tags: google, travel

encrypt email addresses with Javascript

Those pesky spammers. They're out there harvesting our email addresses right off our own web pages. A simple but brilliant way of obfuscating your email address is to encrypt it using a simple substitution cipher and then decrypt it using javascript when the page is displayed. Simple, but hard to break.

A more common method is to encode your email address using HTML entities or hex codes, but it seems like it would be fairly simple for a spambot to use a regular expression search for the html entity for the '@' symbol among a bunch of HTML entities. Those spammers aren't all stupid, you know.

Technorati Tags: email, javascript, security

Read the squiggles

Ever get stuck on one of those login screens where you have to pick out some hard-to-read text in a squiggly, multi-colored image? Those images are called CAPTCHAs, which is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. What a deliciously geeky acronym. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the history and current state of the captcha, with links to current captcha implementations.

It's interesting to note that by definition, the Captcha doesn't have to be an image with text. It just has to be some kind of task that's easy for a human to solve, but difficult for a machine. It could be a sound clip or an easily identified image, like a picture of an animal.

I find the social engineering used to trick people into deciphering captchas to be pretty amusing. It just goes to show that you just can't devise an algorithm to defeat human nature.

Technorati Tags: security

Firefox security update

If you haven't heard already, Firefox has been updated to version 1.0.7 to fix a security problem. Don't forget to update your computer(s). BTW, the next major version, Firefox 1.5, will have built-in updating to make security patches even easier to install, with less to download (not like FF is that big to begin with).

Technorati Tags: firefox, security

2 GB of Gmail

What's this? 2064 MB of Gmail inbox? Nope, can't complain about that one.

I have 50 Gmail invites - any takers?