Passwords are like women

I don’t know if this was posted by someone else somewhere else before (probably it was), but that’s what I came up with yesterday, while explaining our password policy to one of the (male) colleagues.

Passwords are like women:

  • you should have as many of them as you can
  • you should change them as often as you can
  • you should never share them with another man

Judging by reaction, I got the point across.

Compromised!

It appears that this blog has been recently compromised.  Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know.  Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice – one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.

I am still looking into when and how this happened.  The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update).  I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions.  I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).

If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.

Gmail filter activity feature wish

Since my Gmail account gets all my mail from all my email address, I have a huge list of filters configured to sort all that mail the way I want.  After reading this post, I got a bit worried and went to check if there were any filters in my account that I haven’t created.

That was the moment when I got this idea for a new feature – filter activity report. This should work similar to how feed activity works in Google Reader.  With a tiny bit of statistics it easy to drop inactive feeds to clear up the  list of your subscriptions.  The same way, it should be easy to drop old and inactive filters from Gmail.  It should be pretty trivial to do.  Even interface-wise it should be pretty easy with something like “Last used on [insert date here]” indication near each filter in the filter management screen.

Have you thought about …

… what would happen if your Google account get stolen?  I know I haven’t.  And I don’t want to.  That would like losing a house in the flames, with all valuables inside it turning to ash.  Something of that magnitude, but worse.

I need to do a backup or something.  Do you?