Signs of the Times, Part 2

Passwords

Splashdata, the leading password manager, publishes an annual list of the 25 most common passwords, compiled from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online during the previous year. 

The company advises consumers or businesses using any of the passwords on the list to change them immediately.

For the first time since SplashData began compiling its annual list, "password" lost its title as the most common and therefore Worst Password, and two-time runner-up "123456" took the dubious honor. "Password" fell to #2.

The 25 most common passwords of 2013 (2014's list is not yet out), along with the change in rank from the previous year, were:

1. 123456 (Up 1)

2. password (Down 1)

3. 12345678 (Unchanged)

4. qwerty (Up 1)

5. abc123 (Down 1)

6. 123456789 (New)

7. 111111 ( Up 2)

8. 1234567 (Up 5)

9. iloveyou (Up 2)

10. adobe123 (New)

11. 123123 (Up 5)

12. admin (New)

13. 1234567890 (New)

14. letmein (Down 7)

15. photoshop (New)

16. 1234 (New)

17. monkey (Down 11)

18. shadow (Unchanged)

19. sunshine (Down 5)

20. 12345 (New)

21. password1 (up 4)

22. princess (New)

23. azerty (New)

24. trustno1 (Down12)

25. 000000 (New)

For nearly 20 years, the secret code to authorise launching U.S. nuclear missiles, and starting World War III, was terrifyingly simple and even noted down on a checklist. From 1962, when John F Kennedy instituted PAL encoding on nuclear weapons, until 1977, the combination to fire the devastating missiles at the height of the Cold War was 00000000.

This was chosen by Strategic Air Command in an effort to make the weapons as quick and as easy to launch as possible.

The Permissive Action Link (PAL) is a security device for nuclear weapons that it is supposed to prevent unauthorized arming or detonation of the nuclear weapon. JFK signed the National Security Action Memorandum 160 in 1962 that required all nuclear missiles to be fitted with a PAL system. But nuclear experts claim the military was worried about the possibility of command centres or communication lines being destroyed in real nuclear war, stopping soldiers getting the codes or authorization to launch missiles when they were actually needed. So they simply left the security code for the weapons as eight zeros, getting around the security safeguards.

The Air Force has denied that 8 zero’s was ever the nuclear launch code but various other experts say that the Air Force is telling porkies. These boffins point to evidence in support and that the Air Force has been caught out fibbing before.

According to a survey by the University of London, one in ten people are now leaving their passwords in their wills to pass on this important information when they die. One third of people, according to the poll, agree that their password protected data is important enough to pass on in their will. 

In September, 2001, after the deaths of 960 New York employees in the September 11 attacks, financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald through Microsoft broke the passwords of deceased employees to gain access to files needed for servicing client accounts. Technicians contacted families to gather personalised information that might reduce the search time for weaker passwords. 

"This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day. 

The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet."

-  Matt Honan 

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore. 

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-mat-honan-password-hacker/all/

Splashdata, which compiled the list of the 25 most common passwords, also gave these tips for strengthening passwords:

• Use passwords of eight characters or more with mixed types of characters. But even passwords with common substitutions like "dr4mat1c" can be vulnerable to attackers' increasingly sophisticated technology, and random combinations like "j%7K&yPxquot; can be difficult to remember. 

• One way to create more secure passwords that are easy to recall is to use passphrases -- short words with spaces or other characters separating them. It's best to use random words rather than common phrases. For example, "cakes years birthday" or "smiles_light_skip?"

• Avoid using the same username/password combination for multiple websites. Especially risky is using the same password for entertainment sites that you do for online email, social networking, or financial service sites. Use different passwords for each new website or service you sign up for.

• Having trouble remembering all those different strong passwords? Try using a password manager application that organizes and protects passwords and can automatically log you into websites. 

As for me, I’ll stay with “swordfish”. Oops, forget that I said that.

Pulitzer and World Press Photos of the Year: 1975

Caution: Disturbing images

The Pulitzer and World Press Photos of the Year continued: 

Between 1942 and 1967 a Pulitzer Prize for Photography was awarded for photojournalism, that is, for photographs telling a news story. In 1968 that award was replaced by awards in two new categories:

· the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography (photography in the nature of breaking news, as it has been called since 2000); and

· the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography (human interest and matters associated with new items).

From 1955 World Press Photo has awarded prizes for the best photographs in 10 categories, with an overall award for the image that "... is not only the photojournalistic encapsulation of the year, but represents an issue, situation or event of great journalistic importance, and does so in a way that demonstrates an outstanding level of visual perception and creativity".

Photographs of the Year:

1975 Pulitzer Spot (Breaking) News Photograph Winner:

Gerald H Gay, Seattle Times, for his photograph of four exhausted firefighters “Lull in the Battle”

Few will have forgotten the poignant 9/11 images of exhausted and bereaved firefighters at Ground Zero when the towers fell. Nearly 40 years ago a similar photograph, shown above, won photographer Gerald Gay a Pulitzer. 

Listening to a scanner in the early morning alerted Gay to a house fire. According to Gay, he had been a fire junkie since grade school "and would jump on my bicycle with my Kodak Pony 4 camera and chase fire engines." Later in life, while a photographer for The Times, the Seattle P-I and the Everett Herald, he kept a police and fire call scanner "in my car and under my bed, and would always be leaping into my clothes at whatever hour to chase a fire call."

When he arrived at the fire in Burien, south of Seattle, he found that the firefighting had been done. What remained was mud, morning fog, smoke and smell. Plus tired firefighters, four resting against a muddy bank. "I took six or eight frames, all at once," Gay recalled. "They all had a deep, reflective look. I could tell they were rethinking what they'd just been through."

By 1975 the public had seen many photographs of similar tired, reflective young men, but in the context of troops in Vietnam on the front line, pausing after battle. The analogy was also apparent to The Seattle Times, which published the photo that day under the byline "A Lull in the Battle." 

“They were wearing bunker jackets and the three men in front had their helmets off, and with the dense smoke in the background the picture looked to be soldiers in war scene. This is probably why the editors chose the title ‘Lull In The Battle’ ."   - Gerald Gay

Also according to Gay the photograph “ powerfully depicts firemen in a moment of deep reflection after battling a house fire. The photograph speaks of courage, dedication and humanity during the troubled times of the Vietnam War, when many thought our country was other than courageous, dedicated or humanitarian. Like all of my photographs, this picture allows us to travel beyond the obvious and capture the essential about the individual as well as the collective. It urges us to take another look and remember who we are. “

Gay has also been quoted about another aspect of the Burien fire: "The family in that house had found a stray dog that day, and were just planning on keeping it overnight until they could take it to a shelter or find it another home. Well, when the fire started in the basement, that dog went crazy barking, and woke up the whole family. The house was destroyed, but the stray dog saved that family. I think they kept it."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo later became a national fire-prevention poster. 

Years after the fire and the awarding of the Pulitzer, the four firefighters got together to sign the photograph and market it. According to one of the firefighters in the photograph, Chris Kitterman, this was "not to make money but to help tell the whole story of firefighting, to send a little message to, and for, the 3 million firefighters in the U.S. and Canada." Profits were paid to the Northwest Burns Foundation.

The prints were purposely limited to an edition of 911 prints, the universal fire/police emergency phone number.

1975 Pulitzer Feature Photograph Winner:

Miatthew Lewis, for a body of colour and black and white photographs.

According to an article, The Great American Photographer” by Michael Graff:

Click. That’s it. That’s all the time it takes. A click. And it’s there forever. The photograph is a stopped moment, neither moving nor sounding. 

Matthew Lewis Jr’s life is a collection of clicks. For nearly a half-century, starting as a freelancer and continuing during 25 years at The Washington Post and later through “retirement” at The Thomasville Times, he assembled a portfolio thousands deep. He clicked Jacqueline Kennedy crying at President Kennedy’s funeral, a woman praying at the 1963 March on Washington, black men pleading to not be beaten by white officers during the Poor People’s Campaign, and a woman breaking into a store during the D.C. riots. And more. He has the Chicken King holding a chicken, Apollo 9 before it went into space, the Splendid Splinter after he quit playing, and a Beatle without his microphone. He has several of the Washington Redskins, but he prefers those of the Thomasville Bulldogs. 

Lewis spent his life turning his camera toward America and clicking. He documented the world as he saw it, and he reached the pinnacle of his profession, winning the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. 

. . . . 

He’s a small man with a white ponytail, and he grew up swimming in sulfur ponds in McDonald, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. He went to college to become a jazz musician but packed up and came home after one semester. He was a medic with both the United States Navy and the Marine Corps. He returned and worked in a foundry blasting steel, a job that required him to wear leather leggings, jackets, and gloves, along with iron-tip shoes and a helmet that allowed him to breathe through a hose connected to a respirator. 

Humility is important to Lewis. He knows where he started. 

“I’ve been lucky in so many ways,” Lewis says over and over again. “And I don’t know why. I’ll never know why.” 

http://thephotographer4you.com/photography/watch-matthew-lewis-the-great-american-photographer/ 

Lewis’s Pulitzer was the first Pulitzer Prize ever given to a portfolio of colour pictures, and Lewis was the first photographer at The Washington Post to have ever been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

It is difficult to find any of Lewis’ photographs online, here are a couple: 

1975 World Press Photograph of the Year:

Stanley Forman for his photograph "Fire Escape Collapse"

Stanley Forman (1945 - ) was awarded an amazing 3 Pulitzers over a 4 year period. One of those Pulitzers, in 1976, was for a series of photographs about a tragic fire escape collapse, a photograph from that series also garnering him the 1975 World Press Photograph of the Year award. The photograph is shown above.

As Forman ws about to finish for the day, he heard a report of a fire in Boston’s Back Bay. He followed the fire trucks to a six-story apartment house in flames. The blaze is intense and firefighters are in the process of rescuing two persons from a fire escape. The persons are 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her 2-year-old goddaughter Tiare Jones. As a turntable ladder was extending to pick them up from their fifth story balcony 15 metres in the air, things go wrong.

Forman:

“It was 22 July 1975. I was about to leave the offices of the Boston Herald for the day. A call came in about a fire in one of the city’s older sections of Victorian row houses. I rushed to the house and followed one of the engines to the fire. I ran to the back of the building, because on the way there they kept yelling for a ladder truck because there were people trapped in the building on the fire escape.

I ran to the back of the building and when I looked up there was a woman and a child on the fire escape and they were basically leaning at the furthest point from the building because of the heat of the fire behind them. In the meantime, a firefighter called Bob O’Neil had climbed on to the front of the building on the roof and saw the pair on the fire escape. He lowered himself on to the fire escape to rescue them. 

I took a position where I could photograph what I thought was an impending routine rescue. The ladder went up to pick them up – they were about 50ft (15m) up. Mr O’Neill had just told Diana Bryant that he was going to step onto the ladder and asked her to hand the baby to him. Mr O’Neil was reaching out for the ladder when suddenly the fire escape gave way. I was shooting pictures as they were falling – then I turned away. It dawned on me what was happening and I didn’t want to see them hit the ground. I can still remember turning around and shaking. 

It transpired that I wouldn’t have seen them hit the ground as they fell behind a fence where the bins were. When I did turn around I didn’t see them but I saw the firefighter still clinging onto the ladder with one arm, like a monkey, with all his gear. He hoisted himself back up the fire escape to safety. They say the woman broke the child’s fall. The woman died later that night.”

The photo series:

Funny Friday

Wednesday nights are trivia nights. As regular readers know, our trivia team is named Lazarus but I have recently suggested on a number of occasions that we go back to our old practice of changing the name each week to punchlines and phrases from jokes, preferably dirty jokes. Hence in the past we have been called such names as “Why do you ask Two Dogs?” and “Zachary’s Disease”.

Last Wednesday I managed to almost sneak in an answer sheet headed “My wife comes from Minsk” but it was countermanded by the female members, Carol and Kerrie, who didn’t even know the joke. Spoilsports!!

The Minsk joke follows with some other Jewish humour,.  (The Minsk joke is a repost, having been posted in Bytes some time ago).

The only cow in a small twon in Poland stopped giving milk. The people did some research and found that they could buy a cow from Moscow for 2000 rubles, or one from Minsk for 1000 rubles. Being frugal, they bought the cow from Minsk. 

The cow was wonderful. It produced lots of milk all the time, and the people were amazed and very happy. They decided to acquire a bull to mate with the cow and produce more cows like it. Then they would never have to worry about the milk supply again. 

They bought the bull and put it in the pasture with their beloved cow. 

However, whenever the bull came close to the cow, the cow would move away. No matter what approach the bull tried, the cow would move away from the bull and he could not succeed in his quest. The people were very upset and decided to ask the rabbi, who was very wise, what to do. They told the rabbi what was happening; "Whenever the bull approaches our cow, she moves away. If he approached from the back , she moves forward. When he approaches her from the front, she backs off. An approach from the side and she just walks away to the other side." The rabbi thought about this for a minute and asked, "Did you buy this cow from Minsk?" The people were dumbfounded. They had never mentioned where they have gotten the cow. "You are truly wise rabbi. How did you know we got the cow from Minsk?" 

The rabbi answered sadly, "My wife is from Minsk."

There once were two evil brothers. They were rich and used their money to keep their evil ways from the public eye. They attended the same temple, and to everyone else, they appeared to be perfect Jews. 

One day, their rabbi retired and a new one was hired. Not only could the new rabbi see right through the brothers' deceptions, but he also spoke well and true about it. Due to the rabbi's honesty and integrity, the temple's membership grew in numbers. Eventually, a fundraising campaign was started to build a much bigger temple. 

All of a sudden, one of the brothers died. The remaining brother sought out the new rabbi the day before the funeral and handed him a check for the amount needed to complete the new building. He held the check for the rabbi to see. 

"I have only one condition," he said. "At the funeral, you must say my brother was a mensch. You must say those exact words." 

After some thought, the rabbi gave his word and took the check. He cashed it immediately. 

At the funeral the next day, however, the rabbi did not hold back. "He was an evil man," he said about the dead brother. "He cheated on his wife and abused his family. Never once did he commit an unselfish act." He railed on and on about the deceased. After nearly a half hour of the evil truth, the rabbi paused and shrugged his shoulders. Finally, he said, "But compared to his brother, he was a mentsh."

mentsh

An honorable, decent person, an authentic person, a person who helps you when you need help. Can be a man, woman or child.

There is a big controversy these days concerning when life begins. 

In Jewish tradition the foetus is not considered a viable human being until after graduation from medical school.

Three guys are about to be executed, and they are asked what they wish to have for their last meal.

The Italian responds, 'Peperoni Pizza,' which he is served and then he is quickly executed. The Frenchman requests a Filet Mignon, which he is served and then he is promptly executed.

The Jew requests a plate of strawberries. 

STRAWBERRIES???? 

Yes, Strawberries. 

He is told, "But they are out of season!" 

"So, nu, I'll wait . . . ."

nu

A general word that calls for a reply. It can mean, “So?” “Huh?” “Well?” “What’s up?” or “Hello?”

Sophie and Shirley, two elderly widows in a Florida adult community, were curious about the latest arrival in their building; a quiet, nice - looking gentleman who kept to himself.

Shirley said," Sophie, you know I'm shy. Why don't you go over to him at the pool and find out a little about him. He looks so lonely." Sophie agreed, and later that day at the pool she walked up to him and said, "Excuse me, mister. I hope I'm not prying, but my friend and I were wondering why you looked so lonely." "Of course I'm lonely, he said, "I've spent the past 20 years in prison." "You're kidding! What for?" 

"For killing my third wife. I strangled her." 

"What happened to your second wife?" 

"I shot her." 

"And, if I may ask, your first wife?" 

"We had a fight and she fell off a building." 

"Oh my," said Sophie.

Then turning to her friend on the other side of the pool, she yelled, "Yoo hoo, Shirley! He's single!"

The President turned to one of his advisors, who happened to be Jewish, and asked, "How come Jews are always so well informed?" 

Advisor: "What do you mean sir?" 

The President: "It just seems that Jews are always up on the latest news. How do they do it?" 

Advisor: "An interesting observation. It could be because when Jews go to the synagogue to daven (pray), they always turn to the person sitting next to them and say "Nu?" (What's up?). 

The President: "What? Is it that simple?" 

Advisor: "I think so sir." 

President: "Well, let's put it to the test. Take me to the nearest Synagogue." 

The two board a limousine and are driven to the nearest Synagogue. Once inside, the President sits down among the congregation next to an elderly Jewish man. He looks around, then turns to the man and says softly, "Nu?" 

The elderly man leans toward him and replies, "You know, I hear the President is going to daven with us today."

The first Jewish President calls his mother in Queens and invites her for Chanukah. "I'd like to," she says, "but it's so much trouble...First, I have to get a cab to the airport, and I hate waiting on Queens Boulevard...."

"Mom! I'm President of the United States! I'll send Air Force One!" "Yes, but when we land I'll still have to carry my luggage through the airport... An try to find a cab...And you know what holiday crowds are like..." "Mom! I'll have a helicopter pick you up! You'll go straight from the plane to my front lawn!" 

"I don't know... I'd still need a hotel room. And hotels are so expensive..and they're not like they used to be..." "Ma! You'll stay at the White House!" "Well..." She thinks. "I guess. O.K. " she sighs, " I'll come...for you." That afternoon, she's talking on the phone with one of her friends. "What's new?" The friend asks. "I'm visiting my son for Chanukah." "The doctor?"

"No...the other one."

Moishe walks into a post office to send a package to his wife. The postmaster says, "This package is too heavy, you'll need another stamp." Moishe replies, "And that should make it lighter?!"

My mother once gave me two sweaters for Hanukkah. The next time we visited, I made sure to wear one. As we entered her home, instead of the expected smile, she said, "What's the matter? You didn't like the other one?"

Corn Corner:

Two men were down on their luck and decided to paint houses to earn some extra money. To start their business they asked the Rabbi of a local synagogue if he would be interested in their service. He agreed and the men went out to buy the paint. As they drove to the paint store they decided that they would mix half paint and half water to try to increase their profits. When they finished the job they called the Rabbi outside to look at their work. "It looks wonderful," the Rabbi said and as he started to hand them the heck a small rain cloud appeared. All at once there was lightning and thunder and the temple area was drenched with rain. As the rain hit the synagogue the paint started running. Suddenly, as the three of them stood there in disbelief, a voice from heaven said ... "Repaint and thin no more."