Tag: security

Cat’s name as a password? Obsolete!

Remember the good old joke about choosing a secure password and not using your cat’s name as one, even though it is MySup3rKittyCat13*?  Well, that is now obsolete – a better way is to name your kids with SQL injection names.  Xkcd has an example:

exploits_of_a_mom

 

And if you think that this is all just a joke, I assure you it’s not.  Here is a serious question at Stack Overflow that starts with:

We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup application when his last name is used as the search term (which happens to be quite often now).

True story, apparently.

Safe display of external images in Gmail

Official Gmail Blog lets us know that the latest update to Gmail now safely shows external images.  Most other email programs and services disable image show by default, because these can either contain all kinds of malware, or they can be used for tracking.  Gmail solves it now by downloading those images and serving them to users from its own servers.

But thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.

So what does this mean for you? Simple: your messages are more safe and secure, your images are checked for known viruses or malware, and you’ll never have to press that pesky “display images below” link again. With this new change, your email will now be safer, faster and more beautiful than ever.

I’m not the biggest fan of HTML emails, but since I have not much choice in this area, I’d rather receive emails with images – at least I won’t be trying to make sense of empty layouts with no text anymore.

Project Shield – a DDoS protection layer from Google

Project Shield is not a mainstream service yet, just an idea that Google is trying out, but still, I think it’s worth a mention.

Project Shield is an initiative launched by Google Ideas to use Google’s own Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack mitigation technology to protect free expression online. The service allows other websites to serve their content through Google’s infrastructure without having to move their hosting location.

There is also a video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmTvv8ISwPA]