Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

According to a recent development with PS3 processor chips, hackers may well soon be able to hack 8-character passwords in a matter of hours.

This is certainly a startling development. Personally, I had no idea that PS3 CPUs were even this powerful anyway - supposedly much more powerful than a regular home computer when it comes to processing power.

However, this development won’t affect my choice of games console! For those not in the know, I hope to very soon be getting an Xbox 360! Might be a while off yet though…

I was just looking around the Prime Minister’s petition site earlier when I spotted a rapidly growing petition concerning making the Monday after Remembrance Sunday a national holiday.

Not only is this a good idea simply because it would help us all appreciate what we have (a democracy) but it also bridges the gap between late Summer and Christmas during which there aren’t any national holidays. We all get a day off and respectable reason too!

If you’re interested, here’s the petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/remembermonday/

Dan

OK we’ve been learning about Operating Systems and more recently, security on computers at college. We installed firewall software (ZoneAlarm to be precise) which was a new experience for some of the class members, although not myself.

Afterwards, we were told to open the Telnet service by going to Start, right clicking My Computer > Manage, then Services and then  turning it on from there. We pinged a few people’s IP address in the classroom and had great fun creating new folders etc. by typing “telnet [IP address]” and then the chosen command. The whole purpose of this was to see what the firewall would block and what it wouldn’t. The ping tests we usually blocked off (timed out) but the telnet thing wasn’t as long as the service was activated.

Anyway, I wanted to try this back home with my bros PC. Sadly, he’s running XP Home and telnet doesn’t come included with it. I tried going from his computer to mine as I’m running XP MCE 2005 but the router probably blocked it since I couldn’t connect. (more…)

This is a hilarious article I found when I was browsing around the net. There are actually people that ARE this annoying!

MSN Messenger users will agree with me that people with connection problems that sign in 10 times in about 10 seconds is also a great annoyance. There are probably hundreds of other things I could list, but it’s nearly 11pm and my brains turning off!

Before today, I knew that Google gave Mozilla, the corporation behind the Firefox browser, a reasonable amount of it’s money. However, I had no idea it was as high as 85% - this begs the question that if there was a conflict of interest between Google and Firefox, would Google use it’s power to manipulate the browser to it’s own gains? According to Christopher Soghoian’s article, Google has already been playing with Fire.

You’re probably wondering why Google is even interested in promoting Firefox.

Here’s a couple of quick facts regarding the browser and the search engine: (more…)