Gawker Hack Exposes Ridiculous Password Habits - PC World

Whew! Is it just me, or is it getting tough to keep track of all the info spilled via this week's massive Gawker hack?

The please-don't-call-it-Gawkergate Gawker hacking story sprung up over the weekend, when a group known as "Gnosis" apparently made its way into the servers of Gawker Media. Gawker Media, if you aren't aware, is a publication group that runs gossip blog Gawker (no big surprise there) along with a slew of other websites like Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and Jezebel.

Long story short, the hackers danced away with boatloads of secrets, including the e-mail addresses and passwords of more than a million Gawker users (and some Gawker staff members, too). Now, we're getting a glimpse at just how absurdly poor some of those passwords were.

The data-diving crew from The Wall Street Journal analyzed some of the hacked Gawker data in order to find trends in people's password selections. They looked at a sample of 188,279 passwords that was decrypted and made public.

Among the most common passwords they found in the list:

• "123456." This was actually the most popular password of all. As far as I can tell, this indicates one of two things: (a) Lots of people are careless about security; (b) Lots of Gawker accounts belong to Elmo.

• "password." The second most popular password in the list. Evidently, some folks interpret the "Password" prompt as a CAPTCHA field.

• "lifehack." Did someone order an extra-large helping of irony?

• "qwerty." When in doubt, just run your fingers across the keyboard.

• "monkey." One of the more curious items in Gawker's password database. I blame Peter Gabriel.

• "letmein." When you think about it, it really is quite impressive: After all these years, this computing classic is still in style.

• "trustno1." Right. Especially people who use passwords like "trustno1."

• "passw0rd." Oh, do you see what they did there? It's like "password," but not. Good one.

• "cheese." Mmm...cheese. What were we talking about, again?

Ah, yes -- passwords. Perhaps the most surprising twist in all of this is that Gawker's staff didn't do much better. According to Forbes, 15 Gawker staffers had passwords consisting of common words (or "slight variations thereof"). One staff member reportedly used his own name followed by the number "1."

If you aren't sure why any of these scenarios are troubling, please smack yourself in the face (gently -- we don't need any lawsuits here). Then go read up on basic password hygiene, or just grab a utility like LastPass, named one of PCWorld's "Best Products of 2009." It'll generate complex passwords for you and store them securely in the cloud.

Curious if you're among the registered Gawker users whose info has been exposed, by the way? Slate.com has created a handy tool to search the database for your username or e-mail address. If you find yourself listed, check out these tips for some suggestions on what to do next.

And for the love of cheese, never make your password "password" again.

JR Raphael is a PCWorld contributing editor and the co-founder of geek-humor site eSarcasm. You can find him on both Facebook and Twitter.

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Report: Microsoft to Show Off Windows 7 Slider Tablet at CES - PC Magazine

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will demonstrate tablet computers running a version of Windows 7, including a Samsung model with a slide-out keyboard, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in January, The New York Times reported yesterday in a blog post.

The Times didn't name its source, but the person described the Samsung slate device as "similar in size and shape" to the Apple iPad, but "not as thin." The slide-out keyboard is said to be "unique" and "slick." Given that description, the mystery tablet is nothing like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has a 7-inch screen (the iPad's is 10 inches) and no sliding keyboard.

Ballmer will show more slates from Dell and other manufacturers, according to the report. The devices will run Windows 7, though holding them in portrait mode with the keyboard sheathed will activate a "layered" interface. Similar to the announced BlackBerry PlayBook, the new machines are said to be aimed primarily at business users, an audience generally thought to be underserved by the iPad.

The Times report cited one source who suggested Microsoft could even show a tablet running Windows 8, though that appears unlikely. It's possible that Microsoft will show the devices running a variant of Windows 7 or Windows Phone 7 — one that's tailored to work with slate devices, similar to the tablet-specific version of Android dubbed "Honeycomb." Ballmer alluded to such a move in the summer when he said, "We're working with our hardware partners. We're tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs that they're bringing them to market."

Microsoft is said to be encouraging manufacturers to write apps for the new slate machines in HTML5. The apps won't be sold in the Zune Marketplace or any other app store, the Times said. Instead, software partners will host the apps on their own websites.

When contacted, Microsoft told PCMag it had no comment on the rumors.

Tim Gideon contributed to this article.

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Panama City Shootout: School Board Members Fight Back - ABC News

A gunman killed himself after opening fire on a Florida school board meeting. He was confronted by two school officials, one who attacked him with her purse, and another, the security chief, who fired his gun at the shooter.

Police said a 56-year-old man disrupted the the Bay District School Board meeting in Panama City, Fla., walked up to the podium, pulled out a can of red spray paint and painted a large letter "V" with a circle around it.

"The shooter approached the front of the board members, spray painted a symbol on the wall and fired an unknown amount of rounds," said Panama City Police Department spokesman Sgt. Jeff Becker.

"After he painted the symbol he was confronted by a board member [Ginger Littleton] who knocked the gun with her purse," he said.

Inside the meeting was reporter Nadeen Yanes of ABC News afiliate WMBB-TV, who shot exclusive video of the incident.

The gunman released all of the women and children, but held an unspecified number of men.

A fire fight broke out between the gunman and Mike Jones, a former school board member and district security chief, Becker said.

"After reviewing the evidence, the suspect took his own life," said Becker.

Police would not confirm the shooter's identity until his family had been notified. Becker would not speculate on the shooter's motive or meaning of the "V" symbol. Becker also would not confirm the total number of bullets fired.

Yanes said at least 10 shots were fired.

No other injuries were reported.

Police are watching the video Yanes shot of the confrontation.

Beth Deluzain, executive director of the Bay Education Foundation, who works on the second floor of the building said she was not told to leave and things seemed to be under control

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Amazon UK goes offline amid threats of cyber attacks - The Guardian

Amazon.co.uk went down on Sunday night along with other sites hosted with Amazon in Dublin, suggesting technical issues rather than a hacker attack. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

The online shopping site Amazon was briefly offline this evening in the UK, Germany, Italy and France and an unknown number of other countries, possibly after a denial of service attack launched by Anonymous, a loose group sympathetic to – but unconnected with – WikiLeaks.

But others suggested that the failure was due to an internal error affecting the Irish data centre that runs the site in those four countries.

In the UK the site was unreachable, and attempts to connect to the US site also failed initially, though that site rapidly came back online at about 9.30pm. The site was also reported to be down in Italy and France.

Meanwhile Mastercard's main site was also knocked offline, according to the web stats service Netcraft.

Also today, in a separate incident, the gossip website Gawker announced that its encrypted database of 1.5 million user names and passwords used for commenting had been cracked by a "brute-force" attack. Although Gawker does not collect credit card details, the risk is that those of its users who use the same password and name on other sites could see their identities compromised.

"We're deeply embarrassed by this breach," said the operators of the site, part of a network of blogs owned by Nick Denton. "We should not be in the position of relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems."

Amazon could not be reached for comment on whether its sites' failure was due to an attack, or simply because it was one of the busiest online shopping nights of the year in the runup to Christmas. The sites in Canada, US, China and Japan were apparently unaffected.

The monitoring service Netcraft said that "the problems seemed to affect other sites hosted with Amazon in Dublin" – suggesting it was an internal failure rather than a hacker attack.

The Anonymous group, which draws many of its members from the forums of the 4chan website, failed on Thursday in an attempt to bring down Amazon, which is the world's largest online retailer. Disagreement within the loose-knit group meant the majority of attacks were directed at PayPal and left Amazon unscathed.

Discussion within the chat forums where the group attempts to co-ordinate its efforts suggested its members were surprised at the idea that Amazon had gone offline.

The countries affected initially suggests that internal problems, rather than an external attack, might have caused the problem. Amazon's UK, Italian and French sites are all served from a data centre based in Ireland .

The group targeted Amazon because it had withdrawn permission for WikiLeaks to serve pages via its EC2 cloud computing service, where WikiLeaks moved its services on 29 November to avoid a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack from an unknown source, apparently to prevent it publishing thousands of leaked US diplomatic cables.

On 1 December, Amazon announced it was dropping the controversial site just 24 hours after being contacted by the office of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security.

A statement put out later by a faction of Anonymous said attacking Amazon would be in "bad taste" at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

Twitter also this weekend suspended a number of accounts linked to "Operation Payback", the Anonymous campaign to bring down the sites of companies that have cut ties with WikiLeaks. Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, said it was a "terms of service and policy decision" to suspend the accounts.

Both Facebook and Twitter last week separately closed down a number of accounts and pages linked to Operation Payback.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last week attempted to distance the whistleblowers' site from the illegal cyber attacks being carried out in support of the release of thousands of confidential US diplomatic documents.

Assange expressed concern that "people have unjustly accused WikiLeaks of inspiring cyber attacks," according to his London-based lawyer Mark Stephens.

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The best tablet out there? Wait for it ... - Tulsa World

It's nigh impossible to keep up with all the touch-screen computers that have hit or will hit shelves ever since the iPad kicked off the craze earlier this year. And since most of these new tablets are running Android, it's looking like the Apple vs. Google smart phone war has spread to a different front.

Much has been already been said about the Samsung Galaxy Tab ($400-$650), currently the flagship Android tablet, so I thought it would be most interesting to do a full-on comparison between it and the iPad ($500-$830).

Let's start with the form factor. At first glance, there's little difference: Both are rectangles dominated by a touchscreen. The iPad has Apple's traditional single physical button, while the Galaxy has Google's familiar four.

But the iPad has a 10-inch screen, while the Galaxy is just seven. That might not seem like a big difference on paper, but the iPad looks like a behemoth compared to the Galaxy. So which is better?

Really, it depends on what you want to do with it. While the screen quality of both is good, obviously video on the iPad is much more impressive. The extra size gives you more room to use the iPad's touchscreen as a traditional, 10-finger keyboard when trying to get some serious work done, while the Galaxy's is much more cramped.

Then again, the iPad is significantly heavier than the Galaxy. It's not by much, but that extra weight makes a big difference during extended web-surfing sessions or when reading

a book. Unless you invest in some kind of stand or prop, the Galaxy is much more comfortable in the long term.

Galaxy also has a rear-facing camera with flash, as well as a front-facing camera for video chat. The current version of the iPad doesn't.

As for the content of the Galaxy, it's very much an Android, running the latest version of the system. It's got the exact same layout, the exact same use of widgets, the exact same pull-up menu, you name it.

In fact I couldn't really find anything that's changed significantly from the transition to phone to tablet. That isn't a huge problem, as the Android setup works fine for tablets as is. The many thousands of handy Android apps work just as well on the tablet as they do on the phone.

Then again, the iPad launched with many small tweaks to the operating system to take advantage of its size and move it beyond "fine." Its e-mail client can display messages, a list of mail and options simultaneously, while Android still makes you access one at a time.

And Apple's App Store was revamped to make it easy to find apps tuned for the iPad - smart phone apps look a little grainy when running on tablets. There are tablet-specific Android apps trickling out, but good luck trying to find them, as Android's app store doesn't filter between smart phone and tablet apps.

I should also point out that Apple's weird jihad against Flash - the widely used program that powers most video and browser games on the net - is an even bigger blemish on the iPad than the iPhone, since the tablet just begs you to consume media. The Galaxy runs Flash just fine, though popular TV site Hulu blocks itself.

As it stands now, the iPad is a more fully featured and compelling product than the Galaxy. Then again, the Galaxy can be cheaper, and it's more portable. I'm also sure the iPad and Android will continue to evolve and make for better tablets, so it might be worth waiting to see what comes down the pipeline.

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