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Censorship

Submission + - Browsing the broken web: a software developer behind the Great Firewall of China (troyhunt.com)

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troyhunt
troyhunt writes: "Whilst we’ve long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It’s an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can’t work in the country with the world’s largest internet population."
Security

Submission + - The science of password selection (troyhunt.com)

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troyhunt
troyhunt writes: "We all know by now that most people do a pretty poor job of choosing passwords, but what’s behind the selection process? What’s the inspiration for choosing those short, simple passwords that so often adhere to such predictable patterns? It turns out there’s a handful of classic routes that people follow to consistently arrive at the same poor choices – and some of them are pretty shocking."
Security

Submission + - A brief Sony password analysis (troyhunt.com)

Submitted by
troyhunt
troyhunt writes: "So the Sony saga continues. As if the whole thing about 77 million breached PlayStation Network accounts wasn’t bad enough, numerous other security breaches in other Sony services have followed in the ensuing weeks, most recently with SonyPictures.com where a significant portion of the database was publicly disclosed a few days back.

With all this customer data now unfortunately out there for public viewing, I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on password practices. There are some rather alarming (although not entirely surprising) findings including:

36% of passwords appear in a common password dictionary.
50% of passwords are 7 characters or less.
67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password.
82% of passwords are lowercase alphanumeric of 9 characters or less.
99% of passwords don’t contain a single non-alphanumeric character."

Comment Automate your backups offsite (Score 1) 680

by troyhunt (#34959940) Attached to: How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

There are plenty of easy ways to find the additional local capacity, but in terms of backups, IMHO any practice that requires you to manually perform tasks is setting you up for failure. You'll forget to put that backup disk at your mother in laws or you'll carry a few weeks of extra risk because you've been busy or any number of other reasons. And as for keeping backups at home, there's the risk of burglary, fire, flood, four horses of the apocalypse etc, etc.

There are some great online backup services these days that take care of the whole thing for you. Point it at your data, define a backup schedule and let it run. SugarSync gets some good feedback. Personally, I've found Mozy very good and for the sake of $5 per month for unlimited storage, I reckon it's a bargain. Here's my setup: http://troy.hn/bhP4F9

In terms of network and speed, even from Australia (typically slower connection to US based services), I pushed up over 100GB in about 4 days recently. A combination of fast, cheap bandwidth, unlimited storage and a reasonable rate of data collection makes this perfect for the scenario you describe.

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