I should probably use more special keys; I tend to letter/number combos when it matters.

Many years ago I had a numerical password for a bank account that no longer exists. That number has been very useful worked into things since then.

[* -Why “alleged”? They don’t actually say how this list was produced….]

Spotted via BoingBoing

Today at the Chaos Computing Congress, a group of researchers (Alex Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jake Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, Benne de Weger, and David Molnar) announced that they have found a way to forge website certificates that will be accepted as valid by most browsers. This means that they can successfully impersonate any website, even for secure connections.

This is a big deal. But as Ed explains, it is based on an making worse a known weakness in the “MD5 with RSA” hashing algorithm. It can be fixed by having Equifax, which uses this now shown-to-be-insecure hast, replace the hash with something better. And having Equifax (and anyone else using it) revoking all existing certs based on this now vulnerable hash. (Which will cause a new wave of people ignoring security warnings…)

And, as Ed wisely notes,

… this is a sobering reminder that the certification process that underlies web site authentication —- a mechanism we all rely upon daily —- is far from bulletproof.

But I was admiring a nice looking web page with good graphics and drop-down boxes the other day, and wondering how they’d done that. A quick look at the codes suggests it was done in iWeb 2.0.4. So I went looking for that.

Turns out, shoulda figured given the i, that’s its for Mac, and I’m a PC guy.

I even went so far as to see how you might install a Mac tool on a PC. VMware? OK, been thinking of that to run Ubuntu next to XP. External hard drive? OK, got a few spares acting as paperweights. Bittorent a pirated copy? Forget it.

So … anyone know of a good, ideally free, XP-compatible (or maybe Ubuntu-compatible) web design tool that makes cool pages easily?

The facts are grisly:

A Pembroke Pines teenager told an Internet audience he wanted to kill himself by drug overdose — and then he followed through on his macabre threat while a live webcam captured it, according to the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Abraham Biggs Jr., 19, ingested a lethal mixture of three different drugs early Wednesday, then continued to blog about it while others watched online and egged him on.

The end of the video — which shows Pembroke Pines police busting into his bedroom and discovering his body — remained up on LiveVideo.com as of Friday morning.

Yes, I blame the people involved, not “the Internet”.

Florida has displaced the common-law rule against suicide with some statutory provisions. The most relevant one is aimed at assisted suicide (there’s also § 782.081, banning premeditated commercial exploitation of a suicide, but that seems to me not to apply to these facts). Here’s the relevant law:

782.08 Assisting self-murder.—Every person deliberately assisting another in the commission of self-murder shall be guilty of manslaughter, a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

1. Does ‘egging on’ amount to ‘deliberately assisting’?
2. If the statute does make ‘egging on’ manslaughter, does the First Amendment prevent its operation because it protects this sort of speech?

My gut instinct — and I’ll quickly admit this is not my field at all — is that ‘egging on’ does not amount to ‘deliberately assisting’ under this statute, which was pretty clearly aimed at physician assisted suicide, and cases where someone gives a depressed person guns or pills. I see the law as criminalizing the provision of tools in the main. Perhaps this could be extended to specialized knowledge, such as telling a depressed person how to make or find a gap in a protective fence at ‘Suicide Gulch’. But I don’t see it as extending to encouragement — even if a psychiatrist might testify (let us imagine) that the encouragement was a necessary element of the victim’s decision.

Good thing, too, because the second question is much harder…

But there are two kinds of sp*m I do not get at all.

The first kind is the blog comment with a link to a web site of garbage characters. Usually when I click, there’s nothing there. What’s the point? Is the botnet just practicing?

The second kind are email messages like the one I just got twice today, which I quote in its entirety, compete with original formatting:

Dear Sir,
I will like to know if it is possible for me to make
reservations of plane tickets in your travel agency for one of our
members and to pay remotely with international card accorded with
authorizations.
I remain on standby of a favourable response from your office. Please
confirm this booking and forwards fare as soon as possible.[Accra to
Cairo to Paris]
Name: [1] KOFI OPOKU
Date is 15th of November 27th of November 2008.
Best greetings.
Dr Aileen Winch

Any ideas?

The Borg marches on?

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(‘A()’,5 ); void(0)

Refresh for extra vigor.

Did you ever want to take Wikipedia with you while you are offline? Call on WikiTaxi: It is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go.

WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small.

…

WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. If you feel that your offline Wikipedia is getting to old, you can go online to download a more recent version or just copy it from a friend.

Not only is this just simply kewl, but I imagine scholars looking for a way to measure changes in the wikipedia will love this.

The citation is to this (long) YouTube presentation, “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” by Dr. Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University.

(Lots of other interesting stuff there too.)