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.

View the original article here

Move to Ban Earmarks Exposes Both Parties to Divisions in Ideology - New York Times

Given how zealously Mr. McConnell has defended the constitutional prerogative of Congress to control the federal purse, his turnabout was also the surest sign yet that the rightward pressure of Tea Party groups, and an antispending sentiment among voters, have begun to influence the way Washington does business.

At the same time, the renewed push against earmarks highlighted a potential conflict between the calls to eliminate the spending items and demands by many Tea Party supporters for greater fidelity to the Constitution. It is the Constitution, after all, that put Congress in charge of deciding how to spend the taxpayers’ money. In pledging not to let individual lawmakers designate federal money for local purposes, the anti-earmark contingent is in effect ceding more power to the executive branch over how taxpayer dollars are spent, presumably not the outcome desired by the new crop of grass-roots conservatives.

“If Congress does not direct any spending,” said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, who supported the earmark ban, “the president will have 100 percent of the discretion in all federal programs. The failed stimulus is replete with examples of the president’s earmarks that are wasteful.”

The earmark ban is one issue forcing Republicans to navigate among conflicting priorities, like tax cutting and deficit reduction. But it has quickly emerged as a high-profile if somewhat symbolic test of the willingness of Republicans — and some Democrats for that matter — to respond to what they see as a message of the midterm elections.

Both supporters and skeptics of an earmark ban say that it would empower the executive branch, at least initially. While earmarks amount to a trickle in the government’s flood of red ink — slightly more than three-tenths of 1 percent of federal spending — most of that money would still be expended by federal agencies in the absence of earmarks but without specific directions from Congress.

Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the senior Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said, “I remain unconvinced that fiscal prudence is effectively advanced by ceding to the Obama administration our constitutional authority.” But he said he would abide by his colleagues’ wishes .

Some critics of earmarks say the tension between the constitutional and antispending prerogatives is overblown. Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said Congress could easily maintain — and even expand — its purview over spending and still not engage in the earmarking process that has led to corruption scandals and is often viewed as a way to generate campaign contributions.

“This notion that earmarks are an expression of our Article 1 authority, that’s a pretty sad tale,” Mr. Flake said in an interview, referring to the part of the Constitution that gives Congress power of the purse.

He said defenders of earmarks often noted that they accounted for a tiny percentage of federal spending, and Mr. Flake said that was the reason Congress should stop paying so much attention to them.

Instead, he argued, Congress should focus on the vast bulk of the budget that it has already ceded to the administration’s control, and should improve the authorization process by which Congressional committees judge the merit of spending items, the appropriations process in which the money is allocated and subsequent oversight.

Ralph Spampanato, an organizer of the Stark County 9-12 Patriots, in Ohio, said that he supported the idea of an earmark ban and that Congress should exercise its constitutional authority by adopting a budget and demanding that agencies stick to it.

“If they give them the money that’s required to get their basic job done, there won’t be any money leftover to spend,” Mr. Spampanato said.

Mr. Flake said: “We need to reinvigorate the authorization process. The problem with earmarking is you do very little authorizing, a lot of appropriating and very little oversight.”

View the original article here