Sharing your password with someone else

Imagine that you are on travel, and you have a very important transaction to do online immediately, but no access to the Internet (no, not even Wireless. You’re in one of the old ghost towns in Texas where a pay phone if you get one is considered the heights of technology). The love of your life – your wife – doesn’t know the first thing about connecting to the internet. Your next option would be a friend you trust, to whom you would share your credentials, and ask him to get it done. Your password is now shared, till the time you remember to get back online again and change it. If this involved your bank account password with all your life’s savings, I bet your heart would be beating faster than you can imagine till you change it and make sure everything is in order.

Today’s world demands a lot from everyone in terms of security. This includes making your credentials more complex so that it is not easily guessed, and also to remember more than one set of complex passwords to limit the level of compromise if any. If you work somewhere where you deal with a lot of secure data online, most commonly there would be more than one complex password that you would have to remember.

Trust me, people share passwords with others in one way or the other, to make their lives easier. I know people who share passwords of their social website accounts with other friends, just to make sure that the Cafe game they have been playing online does not run out of food in their absence. There are others who share their email account password with relatives they trust (wife, parents, etc.) to check for important mails in their absence. Of course, people choose with whom they share the password, and which ones – but they do share passwords.

How weak is weak?

Consider that you have a simple password such as “mary” or “joey” (or even add a simple numeric combination to it and make it “mary123″ or “joey123″).  A total stranger can get to your password with some effort if he uses the Brute Force method (using a dictionary of words to keep trying your password until it is revealed). He is only limited by the words that is available in his dictionary of words (and also the length of your password), so the larger the dictionary that he uses, the closer he is to your password.

But instead, someone who knows you very well might turn out to be a greater threat than someone who doesn’t. There are many methods other than the brute force by which a cracker (not “hacker” – a hacker, as per me, would be a person who uses such knowledge for a good cause, such as knowing vulnerabilities in a network so that it can be reported and plugged) can find out more about you, such as social engineering. Of course, such things take a lot of time and effort to learn. So the question of how weak is weak is really not answered – there is no such thing as a 100% fool proof password. The best you can do is to make it more secure.

How strong is my password?

Here’s a small tool which will help you get some peace of mind. Type in your password at “How Secure Is My Password“, and it will tell you how much time it would take for an average desktop computer to crack it. This uses a simple formula – (Number of Possible Characters ^ Password Length) / Calculations per second – and tells you how much time it would take a normal desktop computer to crack your password using brute force. You do not have to worry about trying out a few passwords in there, because the site uses client-side javascript (which runs in your own computer) and so, does not save or transmit the data anywhere else. Try testing out some passwords and see if there is something good you can come up with (something which would take thousands of years to crack).

The above website will not give you the most secure password possible. But for one thing, unless you are a master minded criminal wanted by the Interpol or someone, or you are a famous personality (Britney, is that you?) who has a lot of secrets hidden, you can feel assured that the average joe next door who uses common tools he picks off the internet won’t be able to crack your password so easily.

What should I do to keep my password secure?

Here are some ground rules, though it won’t cover all.

1) Keep it easy to remember, but complex to crack – One example: Think of that old school rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. Then your password can be MHALL. That’s easy. But tweak it a little, and you get different combos out of it, such as mH@ll, Mh@!!, etc. Your imagination is your limit, but don’t make it so complex that you yourself have to crack it later.

2) Never share, or never again – If you ever had to share your password with someone, think of the situation why you had to do it, and find an alternative to it so that such a situation does not occur again. In the above scenario you read about, you can probably make sure that all your urgent work is done before you set off on your travel, etc.

3) Change your password regularly – High end corporates who follow strict security norms make it a process to change their account passwords every few months. You can do the same by changing your password at regular intervals, so that only you know what your current password is.

4) Never send your password to anyone via chat, email or phone – This is the same as point 2, but deserves special mention. Any email or conversation that you would have with someone asking you for your password can be a phishing attempt, even though it might look official. There are many cases of mails floating across posing as legitimate banks asking you to login with your id and password. (Here comes another danger of sharing your password – even if you are careful, your close friend might fall into the trap and provide your credentials to that site).

(Image courtesy: Flickr, under Creative Commons License)

Mundu TV is a new service from Geodesic limited (already having products such as Mundu SMS, Mundu Speak, Mundu Radio and Mundu Messenger), which enables you to watch all your favourite TV channels on your mobile or your desktop – provided you have an internet connection or a data plan for your mobile connection. Currently there are a list of channels support by Mundu TV which you can watch anywhere, anytime. All you have to do is download and install the application on your desktop or your mobile phone. The service can be used with any GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WiBro, LAN and Broadband enabled connection.

Following are the channels currently supported by Mundu TV, more to be added later.

Of course there is a price. The application itself is free to download, but there is a subscription charge of Rs. 49/- (for any four channels) or Rs. 120/- (for all channels) per month. You get a 3 day trial period after which you can choose a package and pay for continued viewing.

Mundu TV will officially launch this month. A similar product, Tata Photon Broadband TV, charges about Rs. 7 per channel for similar type of services. If Mundu TV is going to stay with the current price tag, it is going to go a long way towards affordable, downloadable, streamable television.

TigerText, a new iPhone texting application, has the option of adding a “self-destruct” timer to the messages. That is, once the time’s up, the message gets deleted from everywhere – the sender’s phone, the receiver’s phone, and also the messaging server. As per the company, these deleted texts are not “legally discoverable” anymore.

The timer can be set anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days. There are also other options of deleting all texts in a conversation, or the “auto self-destruct” – that is, deleting it as soon as the recipient opens it.

TigerText founder Jeffrey Evans says that “TigerText will completely change the way people think about electronic communication. For the first time, you have complete control over what happens to your texts after you hit the send button. It brings safety and peace of mind to anyone who sends messages that are intended to remain private.”

Fairly priced at subscription rates of $1.49 for every 250 messages per month and $2.49 for unlimited messages, TigerText also offers a free-to-try option of 250 messages for the first 15 days. All you have to do is sign up for an account once you download the application and confirm your phone number to start using TigerText.

For TigerText to work, the application should be available on the sender and receiver’s phone. The messages themselves are never stored on the phones. They are kept on the server, and the purging of expired messages happens every minute of the day, as per the vendor. Currently this app is available only for iPhones, while Android and Blackberry versions are already in the works.

Boogie Board, from Improv Electronics, is an LCD writing tablet that you can write on to without using any power. Only the erasing part consumes a bit of power, and that’s quite good for a writing tablet that can support 50,000 erases on a watch battery. The tablet can also recognize varying amounts of pressure so that it can differentiate between thick and thin lines while writing. The device uses what is called a “Reflex LCD”, a pressure-sensitive flexible plastic, which does not require any power to retain what’s written on it. The device is thin, compact and light-weight, with a writing space as much as half a sheet of letter size paper. And what’s more, you can also use different tools to get different textures – such as the stylus, a paint brush, a pen cap, or even a fingernail.

There is one catch – you can’t connect it to a computer or any other device to save what you’ve written or drawn. You can use it for writing short notes, hard copy it later and then erase it. But if you use it in place of paper, the vendor claims that the savings are significant.

Where and who can/will use it?

Now that it can’t connect to a computer, think outside.

You can attach it on to your refrigerator or to a wall to leave quick notes or messages. You can attach it to your car visor or dash to jot down reminders or quick thoughts on the go. It also makes an idea writing surface for people with vocal injuries, speech impairments or other disabilities which makes it difficult to write with a normal pen and paper. There are countless other uses that you can come across.

If you are someone who uses a lot of paper at work or play just to jot down notes and can’t keep track of all those paper notes, this might be worth a try.

On Friday, Timothy J Creamer, an astronaut from NASA sent the first ever Tweet from outer space. This was made possible after a software upgrade that NASA made enabling astronauts to connect wirelessly to the web – something that NASA calls “the ultimate wireless connection”.

Screenshot of TJ Creamer's space-famous Tweet

Image courtesy:

iFixit provides a full “inside-out” view of the $530 phone disassembling it using a Philips screw driver. What’s more, they even made a slideshow out of it. Check out more here.

Well, the odd thing about binged.it as many have noticed is that it’s longer than Bing.com (lets be fair, it’s just one character longer). Currently all requests to binged.it gets redirected to Bing.com, but some Microsoft employees have already started using this service. This is not yet public, but surely hope they get around to doing it.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if we get to see a WinLi.ve  or a Yah.oo very soon.

According to SourceSec, this vulnerability exists in the DI-524, DIR-628 and DIR-655 routers. D-link has a secondary admin interface which uses HNAP (Home Network Administration Protocol), which has been part of D-link routers since 2006. HNAP authentication is SOAP based, and requires basic admin authentication, but some of the D-link routers enable an attacker to get through using the GetDeviceSettings SOAP action to bypass the security mechanisms. Though GetDeviceSettings does not, on its own, give out any sensitive information, it can be used to bypass the authentication requirements for all other SOAP actions.

Further details on the research is given in the paper here. Currently there are no known ways to disable the HNAP implementation on D-link, so there is no fix to this as of now. D-Link has been first to add the CAPTCHA security check to its home routers to help prevent attacks, but this vulnerability can be used by an attacker to get through many security measures including CAPTCHA. SourceSec has also provided a sample exploit called HNAP0wn on their website.

NxSet Music 1 and 2

No, you’re not looking at Geordi LaForge’s visor.

The S1 Audio NxSet (pronounced “neck-set”) is equipped with an embedded speaker, and can be wrapped around your neck. Connect it to your wired or wireless audio player, iPod or phone, and you’ve got your own world of music around your head.  These headphones then project the music toward your ears by mean of a pair of built-in speakers and a hi-fi amplifier.

NxSet comes in different models to choose from. There is the NxSet Music 1 which can project music to the user’s ears, and can also double as a portable speaker system at higher volumes. Then there is the NxSet Music 2, similar to the Music 1 mode, but with retractable earbuds which can be plugged into your ear for totally private listening. There are also the NxSet Mobile 1 and Mobile 2 versions which are designed for mobile phones, equipped with blue-tooth technology for the device to connect without cords. The difference between the Mobile 1 and Mobile 2 version is – you guessed it – “retractable earbuds which can be plugged into your ear for totally private listening”.

So far not a prospective crowd puller, but if you want to know more about the product, you can check out the product page here.

A traditional Windows desktop is not always the best thing to work with. Of course it is easy to work with, but after sometime, having to see the same screen over and over is quite boring.

In case you are whom I’m talking about, here are 5 of the popular virtual desktop managers for you to play around with.

(Note: Before you download and install any file from anywhere on the internet, make sure that your Antivirus and Spyware softwares are updated. Also, ensure that you have a System Restore point created before you install any software so that you can revert back to that point.)

1) 3DNA Desktop

Vendor: 3DNA

Available versions: Free to try
Download: Download from Downloads.com.

3DNA Desktop

The 3DNA Desktop improves the way you work with Windows and the Web. Just imagine, in your home if you can just your hand reach up and click on that link that is floating around to browse the internet or play music or video. 3DNA does – well, almost – just that!

There are a variety of different 3D Add-on Worlds to explore and customize for an immersive and entertaining desktop. 3DNA works by overlaying the wallpaper area and easily lets you toggle between your 3D and 2D desktop with the click of your mouse.

2) 3D Wonder 3D Desktop

Vendor: Gamers Tower

Available versions: Free to try
Download: Download from Downloads.com

3) 360 Desktop

Vendor: Gamers Tower

Available versions: Free (Beta version)
Download: Download from Downloads.com

If your 180 degree desktop space is filled up, how about you get another 180 degree space more? 360desktop transforms your standard Windows desktop into a 360-degree panoramic workspace, giving you many times more desktop space. It runs like any of your other Windows programs, and is easy to switch back and forth between this and the old Windows screen.

Here’s a link to their gallery where you can see all the amazing ways in which you can regain your desktop space!

4) goScreen

Vendor: goscreen.info

Available versions: Free to try
Download: Download from Downloads.com.

If you work with multiple programs, you would have numerous windows open, and sometimes you find it very hard to get back to your Desktop. So, which one of the below would you want your desktop screen to look like?

Desktop Without GoScreen

Desktop With GoScreen

Check it out for yourself.

5) Samurize Desktop

Vendor: goscreen.info

Available versions: Free
Download: Download from Samurize.com.

Samurize is a 100% free multi-utility Desktop manager, used by IT professionals, overclockers, gamers and desktop modders alike for system information, weather reports, news headlines and much much more. Best of all, it’s 100% free. Check it out.