25 Worst Passwords of 2011

SplashData released their list of what they regard as the “25 worst passwords of 2011″. 

Password – 123456 – 12345678 – qwerty – abc123 – monkey – 1234567 – letmein – trustno1 – dragon – baseball – 111111 – iloveyou – master – sunshine – ashley – bailey – passw0rd – shadow – 123123 – 654321 – superman – qazwsx – michael – football

I know of IT technicians that use bad passwords like this and consequently expose their entire system to hacking.   Change passwords often.  Try to steer away from words when forming a password, but rather use a combination of random letters and numbers.

Free internet for all

Internet prime movers including the bosses of Facebook and Google put their proposals to the G8 summit of world leaders on Thursday, calling for governments to guarantee internet access.

“This has been almost unanimous that we should provide free, open access to internet to everyone on Earth,” said Maurice Levy of the Publicis advertising group, who hosted Wednesday’s e-G8 meeting in Paris. “Yes we should protect intellectual property, no we shouldn’t create a situation by which internet cannot grow and cannot develop,” Levy said, warning that failure to provide high-speed internet could “create a collapse of the system”. “There is a serious need to invest heavily in high-speed ADSL and other high speed systems,” Levy said.

Read the full story here:  http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Internet-bosses-want-free-access-20110526

The end of slow internet connections

Computer users who despair over slow internet connections should take heart.  German scientists have broken a speed record, sending data contained on 700 DVDs over a single laser beam, in one second.  The scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) on Monday said they had broken the world record by sending data at a speed of 26 terabits per second.  The data, sent over 50km on a single laser beam, was coded thanks to a system known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in which the laser beam is divided into separate colour streams.  “With 26 terabits per second, you can simultaneously transmit up to 400 million telephone calls per second,” said Professor Juerg Leuthold of the institute in a statement.

Read the full article here:
http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Germans-transfer-data-at-26Tbs-20110523