I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
Color builder for 256-color terminal
With most Linux terminals now supporting 256 colors, a tool like this one is mighty useful in building the escape sequences. Â For off-line use, all code is available in GitHub repository, and all logic behind the calculations is explained in this Habrahabr post (albeit, in Russian).
Today I got an email from LinkedIn, telling me that I am about to get an improved profile.
On December 11, 2012, you’ll be getting the new LinkedIn profile, which has a simplified design, provides deeper insights, and surfaces new ways to connect and build relationships. You’ll also be one of the first to preview a new way to showcase rich content on your profile — like presentations, videos, documents, and more.
But it’s not only the new functionality, some of the old functionality will be removed:
Now there are more ways than ever to tell your professional story on LinkedIn, and we’re excited for you to try them out. As we roll out these changes, we’ll also be streamlining our app offerings, so the following LinkedIn apps will no longer be supported on the homepage or profile as of December 11:
- Blog Link
- GitHub
Unfortunately, these are the only two applications that I am interested in. Â As a blogger, I want to have my blog’s RSS feed broadcast to LinkedIn. Â And as a developer, I can’t think of a better way than GitHub profile to showcase my work at LinkedIn.
I wonder what bits of new functionality will allow to compensate for this gaping hole…
Holy Molly! Â Finally, one of the two things that I’ve been missing a lot from GitHub saw the light of day. Â From now on, GitHub issues can have attachments. Â So far, they are limited to only image types, but that’s enough for the majority of the situations. Â Because that’s what you need the most – a screenshot illustrating the problem.
Now, if only one could open up project issue tracker to general public without playing around with the API, GitHub would be complete and absolutely perfect. Â But something tells me that’s just a question of time. Â So, waiting …
Slashdot is reporting the story:
a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric. Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete. In a test, the researcher’s system was able to generate 348 billion NTLM password hash checks per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM for example, would fall in just six minutes
[…]
Gosney’s cluster cranks out more than 77 million brute force attempts per second against MD5crypt.
One of my favorite comments to the story:
So now that passwords as a system is officially broken, can we please move on to something better? Something that wasn’t invented to allow soldiers standing watch in the middle of the night to tell their mates from their enemies, but is actually designed for computers?
Solutions? Â Well, for remote connectivity, I’ve been using SSH with key-based authentication. Â For the websites, Google seems to be leading the 2-way authentication progress, with a combination of password and a one-time code via SMS. Â These aren’t perfect, but they seem to be better than just a password.
