Day: October 21, 2010

Posted on

A Trifling Tidbit

…if that’s not entirely redundant. 😉

For a long time now, I’ve chosen passwords based on a topic-subtopic-specific, misspelled and then with added characters and numerals and upper/lowercase letters interspersed to make a word (preferably longer than 12 letters) or phrase sort-of-halfway-kinda resemble the original word or phrase in a manner that’s memorable to me.

Recently, though, somehow my gmail account became vulnerable despite what several online password checkers from reputable companies thought was a “strong password” so…

I’ve begun changing my passwords again, this time using lyrics to songs I know–some that are even “semi-unpublished” *heh*

Here’s the trick:

Write out (if you’re a little unsure of the lyrics) the lyrics to a song–the older and less likely to be common knowledge among the illiterati the better. Now, select the first letter of each word of the first (or second or third… ) verse. Assemble those into your “rough sketch” for a password. Now, in some way that makes sense to you–all the letters from the first half of the alphabet, all vowels, all “voiced” consonants, etc.–capitalize some of the letters. Substitute numbers for other letters. Add characters like “@!%#” at places within the string of letters in ways that make some loose sense to you.

I recently changed out my first (of more than a few) email passwords with a 40-character password devised this way. Yes, I have my passwords saved on hardcopy in place that’s accessible to family only, and yes I have them saved in an encrypted, password-protected zipped text file.

It’s not all that hard, and it beats putting your birth date or wedding anniversary on a sticky note slapped on your monitor… *heh* By quite a lil bit.

Oh, my computers’ passwords are considerably less complex, because

  1. They’re in a fairly secure environment and
  2. Anyone wanting to crack ’em can probably do so with Ophcrack or other tools, anyway.
Posted on

More Evidence Suggesting That Even Reading News Can Make One Stupid

From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article in 2009 that I ran across looking for something else,

“Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can manifest itself in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms, hepatitis C has become better known publicly in recent years.”

Oh, really?

man·i·fest
[man-uh-fest]
–adjective
1. readily perceived by the eye or the understanding; evident; obvious; apparent; plain: a manifest error. . .

–verb (used with object)
3. to make clear or evident to the eye or the understanding; show plainly: He manifested his approval with a hearty laugh.
4. to prove; put beyond doubt or question: The evidence manifests the guilt of the defendant. . .

—Synonyms
1. clear, distinct, unmistakable, patent, open, palpable, visible, conspicuous. 3. reveal, disclose, evince, evidence, demonstrate, declare, express. See display.

—Antonyms
1. obscure. 3. conceal.

A thing cannot be “manifest” while not “showing any symptoms”. It’s just not possible. What the idiot who wrote the sentence above apparently meant was something like, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can remain hidden in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms,” but that’s an unnecessarily cumbersome and excessively wordy way of saying simply, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because those infected often show no symptoms for decades. . .”

But, of course, the subliterate idiot who wrote the article (and his editor) apparently don’t know the meanings of the words they use, so they “misunderedumacate” their (also likely subliterate) readers.

And no, it’s not comforting to know that major newsrags are populated with “reporters” who are no more literate than those who write for America’s Third World County’s weekly birdcage liner.

With crooks like this (yeh, taking pay as a wordsmith for subliterate screeds is theft, IMO) populating so-called journalism–and they’re prevalent in all the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind–such crap polluting public discourse seems designed to bring literacy down to the lowest common denominator. And that feeds right in to my blog’s header quote…