Oct 12
How-To Guides David
add-on, crack, e-mail, email, extension, firefox, free, gmail, google, hack, hotmail, maker, mobile, online, open, password, source, yahoo
Password Maker
If you were following the tech news last week, hopefully you’ll have heard about the surge in leaked and phished passwords from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. CNET UK covered it twice.
This brings up the thorny issue of how to effectively manage all of your passwords. Some people have one strong password they use everywhere, others will do this but append something for each site. Other people, who frankly scare me, use simple things like “password”, “12345″, “67890″, etc.
What exactly is a strong password? The more random and unpredictable a password is, the stronger it is. In other words, predictable passwords are easy to remember, and easy to crack.
Randomly flaying your fingers at the keyboard will generate a random block of text. Although, you need to recall this random text sometimes, but how? You could keep them all in a file, but this is no good, because if someone gets that file, you’re sunk (same goes for paper records). Even if you use a password manager which keeps your passwords in an encrypted file, they’re still there in a file, which if obtained, could be decrypted by brute force.
The Password Maker Firefox add-on.
A while ago, I listened to Floss Weekly interviewing Eric Jung from the Foxy Proxy project. During the interview, his involvement with a free and open source project called Password Maker was mentioned. Password Maker works by generating a cryptographic hash of both the domain of the website you’re logging into and a master password of your choosing. Thus creating a different piece of pseudo-random text for every website you use. There are lots more settings so that you can finely tune what goes into the password, but don’t worry about those just now.
To put is simply, you never have to find or recover your passwords, because they’re never stored, they’re just generated for you when you need access to them.
The best way to use Password Maker is in the form of a Firefox add-on. However, if you’re away from home, or whatever, there is an on-line version and a mobile browser version, which you can even install on your own website, if you have one. This best security aspect of this is that your master password isn’t stored, and the hashing algorithm is already open, so there’s nothing to hack.
If any one of your site passwords are compromised, it is easy to create a new one by using a new master password. Furthermore, so that you’re not having to remember different master passwords for different sites, I would take one compromised password as an excuse to change ALL of your passwords. Changing your passwords is inconvenient when you have a lot of accounts on the web, but Password Maker makes it easier to get into the habit, especially with the Firefox add-on.
The recent news pushed me into finally doing this, although I had been putting it off due to the fear of trying to make it work with my mobile browser. Although thanks to Opera Mini 5 now supporting text selection and tabbed browsing. This makes the mobile browser version a viable method for advanced password management on your phone.
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Sep 7
Editorial David
android, copyright, DRM, iphone, mobile, mp3, music, online, piracy, rights, spotify, streaming, subscription, symbian
The Spotify application and its "home page"
You have no doubt heard about Spotify, in fact given the amount of e-mails I get asking for invites, I’d be amazed if you haven’t. In my opinion, Spotify plays a crucial roll in the world of on-line music distrobution. Before you commit your money to buying a whole album, I believe, you have a right to try before you buy. Much to the chagrin of music companies, illegal file sharing perfectly fits the roll. You get the try the album with no hassle and no money changing hands, and then, as long as you’re honest, when you’ve made your decision, you can choose to delete the album, or go and buy it from a DRM free online music store. To me, doing this, while of questionable legality, was the nearest on-line alternative we had to the headphone booth in your local music store.
However, Spotify came along and took away all the grey area of illegally sampling music. With Spotify you can stream music across the internet and listen to it as much as you like. With adverts if you pay nothing, and without if you pay £10 a month, we’ll return to the premium service below.
That is not to say that Spotify is perfect. When it first started it was more perfect that it is now. Since it’s been going, the record companies have been stamping their ignorant size 12 boots all over it, so that we now have region restriction on some albums, while others have been pulled completely, even though Spotify are constantly adding more and more tracks. To the record labels I say this; the more restrictions you put onto a service like Spotify, which you should be thanking your lucky stars for, the more you will push people back towards illegal file sharing. It’s a simple mathematical matter of convenience. Spotify is actually more convenient than getting music via file sharing. If you prevent people listening via Spotify, they will by simple human nature, opt for the next most convenient option. Sorry, but it’s a fact of life and you can either work with it, or be burned by it. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s how things are.
Now, lets look at Spotify premium. For some people who would spend hundreds of pounds a year on music, and hate the adverts, then this £10 a month could represent good value. Speaking for myself, I just don’t get that much new music, so £10 a month is an expensive option for me, just to block adverts, which to be honest, aren’t that intrusive (and if I’m saying that, then that means something). So I will stick with Spotify making advertising revenue from my listening, and I think the majority of Spotify users are the same.
Spotify Mobile running on Android
The next generation of Spotify is a version for your mobile phone. As of today, we know that Spotify Mobile is available on the iPhone and Android phones. So hopefully, we will soon see it available on other platforms like Symbian.
I find the prospect of the mobile Spotify being a premium only feature somewhat self-defeating. However you look at it, paying to effectively rent your music, never has been, and never will be, a good deal for the consumer. I don’t see the added value of a mobile application is going to change this. Let’s prove this by contradiction. If you weren’t prepared to pay for Spotify premium on your desktop, but the addition of a mobile app would change your mind, then you are effectively saying you’d be willing to pay £10 a month to have an application on your phone. I find it hard to believe anyone would fall into this category.
Conversely, if Spotify made their mobile application available to everyone, they would be expanding their prospective advertising audience. Advertising revenue must be valuable to them, given that it’s unlikely many users pay for premium. Speculatively, they must only be surviving on advertising revenue, with the addition of some venture capitol.
To conclude, please Spotify, reconsider the mobile application. We all love you, and want to use your service, but £10 a month for no ads and a mobile app is too much. Just mirror your desktop business to the mobile world, and everyone wins.
P.S.
NO, I don’t have any Spotify invites to give you, but I will make a blog post, if and when I do 
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Jan 24
Website Updates David
conversion, online, pdf, pdf24
I’m experimenting with a new plugin. You may notice below each post there is a line that says “Send post as PDF to” with a form to enter your e-mail address.
This is a plugin that sends my posts over to a site called PDF24 where their servers converts my posts to PDF and e-mails it to you. I know most of my posts don’t really warrant this, although I have been writing some longer posts lately that I thought might benefit from being downloadable in PDF form.
Anyway, please test it out, and let me know what you think to the idea in general.
Thanks.
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