Check out the free alternative Strong Password Generator instead. It also offers helpful hints to help you remember your password.

For example (from Strong Password Generator: )

Your new strong password is:
mOK7Ye6

Remember it as:
microsoft OPRAH KMART 7 YELLOW elvis 6

“At least 34 companies, including Adobe, Symantec, Yahoo and Dow Chemical, were attacked, according to industry sources.”

Whether or not it was a government sponsored attack is irrelevant here (let the FBI/NSA/CIA figure it out, our tax dollars pay for that sort of thing). The common thread in all the attacks is that Internet Explorer was exploited and used to gain access to the infrastructures of these companies.

Do you still use Internet Explorer? The version doesn’t matter, even 8 still sucks. Ask yourself why. If Symantec, Google, Adobe and Yahoo couldn’t protect themselves from an Internet Explorer exploit, what makes you think you can? Google even has the cajones to come out and publicly lambast China and denounce Microsoft XP/IE6 and urge users to move away from Internet Explorer (props to Google).

Switch today. There are plenty of better and more secure browsing options out there. Our personal favorite in the office is Google Chrome. It is lightweight, extremely fast, secure, and works great with web apps like Gmail and Google Wave. It has the fastest javascript engine and pages load lightening quick. Apple’s Safari is also secure, but not as fast as Google Chrome. Opera is also plenty fast and secure as well. There is also Mozilla Firefox, which isn’t as fast, and becomes more insecure the more plugins you add into to it, due to how plugins run with all permissions. Personally I think Firefox is bloated and slow, but it was the first real alternative to Internet Explorer after Netscape left the scene some years ago.

Lastly, if you are still using Windows 98, 2000, XP, its time to move on. Don’t leave your front door open and then complain when your home is robbed. Windows 7 is great, OSX is great, and if you are feeling adventurous, try out Ubuntu.

Fortunately, there is a program out there that will help you keep track of your passwords in a secure way. KeePass is a free program for Windows, Linux, iPhone, and OSX and other portable devices. KeePass allows you to store login information for reference. For example, if you have an Amazon account and you go to log into the website, you can open KeePass and grab your password to paste into the login form at Amazon.

KeePass keeps your data in an encrypted database that must be opened with a master password. Think of it like the key to your front door. This is the only password you need to remember, because it will prevent you from getting to your data if you cannot remember it (just like losing your key to the house will have you locked out).

The best way I have found to use KeePass is to install the software on the machines you frequently use, and store your KeePass database on a USB stick for safekeeping. That way, you can access your passwords anywhere you are, so long as KeePass software is installed.

If you do a lot of commerce online, it would be a good idea to look into this solution for yourself. Better safe than sorry!

Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

Watch the screencast here: http://vimeo.com/7669508

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

This is the highest award that Drupal was eligible for in 2009. Drupal previously won for Best Overall CMS in 2007 and 2008 has been placed in the Hall of Fame. The winners of the Hall of Fame Drupal awards for best Drupal theme and best Drupal contributed module will be awarded Thursday, November 12th, 2009. The themes and modules nominated were selected both for the most used and for a diverse set of nominees.

We use Drupal exclusively for building customized, scalable high end web applications. It’s no surprise developers, designers and users keep voting Drupal as Best CMS for years in a row. There is nothing you cannot do with Drupal. Being a CMF (content management framework), it is not pigeonholed into any one particular niche like Wordpress (strictly blogging applications).

What has Inclind done with Drupal?

• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics SOP System into Ubercart for product importing and inventory management
• Integration with Ubercart and Drupal into UPS Worldship for rock solid quoting
• Integration with UPS Worldship for automatic label printing for commerce orders
• Integration with Amazon S3 services for synced failsafe CDN (Content Distribution Network) support
• Integration with Windows LDAP Protocol support
• Integration with Invision Power Board Forum for external authentication of users through Drupal
• Integrated Ubercart as a management application of customers with interval based shipping orders (drop shipment / bulk ordering)
• Built routing algorithms to track and route best delivery methods for truck drivers on to Google Maps
• Built over 100 custom modules to meet the needs of individual clients
• … with more to come

Who else uses Drupal? Check it out!

• AOL
• The White House
• Yahoo
• IBM
• Bob Dylan
• The Onion
• CNN
• Metallica
• United Nations
• jQuery
• Sony BMG
• Michael Jackson
• Ozzy Osbourne
• EA Games
• Star Trek Online
• Mastodon
• Warner Bros
• CKY
• MTV
• MTV2
• SpreadFirefox
• SpreadThunderbird
• Computer World

A lot of the changes took place under the hood, so most people won’t notice much of a difference visually. This upgrade was strictly about performance improvements, with a few minor UI enhancements. Hey, I’m fine with that, as OSX Leopard runs smooth as it is on my Macbook. Among one of the big features is integrated support for Microsoft Exchange, so if you’re a Mac based business or an employee with a Mac machine, you can ditch Entourage once and for all tomorrow. All you IT folks out there with a mixed environment of Macs and PCs are probably all too familiar with the shortcomings of Entourage on an Exchange based mail system. I can’t wait to get it setup on my Macbook because honestly using Outlook Web Access to access webmail is a chore, especially on a system without Internet Explorer (Outlook Web Access is very limited in non IE browsers by design- bad form, MS). Our iPhone’s work well with our Exchange server and its about time that our desktops/laptops will too.

OSX Snow Leopard will include the latest versions of Safari 4, Quicktime X, and Finder. While Finder and Quicktime aren’t ‘new’, they’ve been rebuilt in Cocoa and purported to be much faster than current versions. Safari 4 comes with speed improvements and better Javascript performance.

Upgrading will cost you a meager $30, while the full version is a reasonable $130.

Links:

Gizmodo Review
Engadget Mac / Exchange Article

Most people don’t walk around with their credit card taped to their shirt like a “Hello, my name is” sticker. So, why do so many people seem to wear their passwords for the public to see?

The majority of security measures require the password owner to be responsible and intelligent. A password is only as secure as it’s owner. We’re all familiar with the security measure that requires you to change your password every set number of days while also restricting you to new passwords only. Many owners will see this and their password complexity will regress because of it; effectively eliminating the reason for this measure. Instead of probing their brains for a logical course of ever-changing strong passwords, many will choose a password like “amy1″. Once they’re forced to recreate their password, all they could come up with is “amy12″.

This basically voids the reasoning behind changing your password. The strongest passwords are random; utilizing upper and lowercase characters, special characters, and numbers. Strong passwords can contain a word, but they’ll be stronger if they do not. Passwords also should be long. So, how could you create a ever-changing secure password using the criteria above?

Many have turned to substituting alphabetical characters for special characters or numbers. This is known as “leet speak”, or “1337 speak”. If you’ll notice from “1337″, the one (1) is replacing an L, the three’s (3) are a backwards E and the seven (7) is basically a T. There is no definitive way of accomplishing “leet speak”, so any combination of special characters and numbers to recreate traditional characters is open.

I personally would go one step farther in creating unique memorable passwords that have the ability to change. Like many people, I have trouble remembering a persons name. To commit a persons name to memory, quite often, I need to look deeper than just a name. I seek out and apply a memorable reference to the name. Recently I met a couple named Joe and Sharon. Before our introduction, I said their names like the old movie Tarzan: “Me Tarzan, You Jane”, or “Me Joe, You Sharon”. This has allowed me to remember their names, as I often think of Tarzan before arriving at their residence now. This same thought process could be applied directly to passwords. If I needed to make an infinite amount of passwords for something related to these two people, I could use anything from the movies or books of Tarzan. Each new password could contain any vague reference that I will remember because of it’s relation to Tarzan.

This is all well and good, however, all of the password security in the world cannot physically shut a persons mouth. The biggest culprit in password theft, or cracking, comes from a person being verbally cavalier with their passwords. When in meetings with clients, or out with friends, people will often just yell it out so they aren’t bothered with typing. If you need to give out your password to anyone for a short amount of time, do not give them your current password. If you have the ability to change your password freely, change it temporarily to a shared password. Once the third party has finished using this password, quickly change it back to your secret secured password.

Can’t thing of a good secure password? Are you still having trouble remembering your passwords? Do you have too many to remember? There is help out there. Many free, online and offline, applications are available to help you stay safe:

Good Password: Good Password is a great site for generating strong passwords. By default, the “Random Password” generator is already setup to use upper/lowercase letters and numbers at 12 characters long. You can add special characters with one click of the “(.?:;!,)” checkbox.

Note: “Leet Speak” has been around for quite a while. Without going into too much detail, this password generator will take what you have written in the field and convert it to the same word. There is no definitive way to accomplish this, so other translators may be different. (e.g. Password = p4$$w0rd)

RoboForm2Go: There are quite a few products out there that will help solve the location dilemma. RoboForm2Go has a free version to get you started. It provides plug and play support, ties into popular browsers, gives you options to encrypt your passwords, and even saves non-form passwords such as Unix terminal passwords.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Right on. Trey and I always felt that this would happen sooner rather than later, as most people use software that is hosted in the cloud of the internet. Google, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Zoho, Facebook, etc… more and more software is online rather than offline, and all the user needs is a system with a browser to do their daily business.

This couldn’t come at a better time, with the backlash from Vista’s performance, confusing / labor intensive Linux distro,  and expense of an Apple system. I wish Google the best with this product, because it could really lower the cost of entry barrier for home PCs and internet surfers, and further drive the hot market of Netbooks right now.

Source: Google Blog

I myself was a skeptic and thought oh boy, another browser. It’s difficult enough with 4 browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) to maintain a level of consistency and future proofing of your markup and javascript to not only work now, but work a year or two from that point. I was relieved when I found out Chrome is founded on WebKit and not some proprietary engine like Internet Explorer is, which would be quite silly.

I tried to benchmark the loading speed of the browser, and well, I couldn’t. This little baby is faster than Opera on a good day, and at worst, Firefox on a bad day (its a good thing). I made sure to clear out all history, cache, and cookies then tried again. Still lightening fast. I tried everything I could think of that would slow me down some from Digg to Scriptaculous to Design Melt Down to Ebay and CNN. Nothing. The sites loaded up before I could blink or release the Enter key. Even some javascript heavy sites didn’t bog down this browser at all. Major points in my book.

So, while I had trepidation last night about the arrival of yet another browser, Google really has a homerun product here. With a stripped down browser like this, organized fairly well, it should do great on the market and generate a lot of buzz. Chrome will be replacing Firefox for me at home, and if it continues at this pace, I’ll use it as my main at the office as well. Somewhere, Steve Ballmer is exploding in anger.

Learn more about Chrome »

Inclind Inc has launched Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library website. Utilizing our powerful content management system (CMS) publishing platform, managing their website is quick and painless and allows them to get their important message out. Their objective is to supply a book a month to children aged 12 months to 5 years to promote literacy at a crucial time in the development of young minds. Opportunity and education are cornerstones of our country and its great that foundations like this exist to help future generations get a head start.

How Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Started

Dolly Parton started this program in 1996 in her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, as a way to give back to her community and to promote literacy. She personally paid for each newborn child to receive a new board book, “The Little Engine that Could” by Watty Piper. Those children were also sent one new hard back book each month until they were five years old. On their fifth birthday, they received their last book, “Look Out, Kindergarten, Here I Come” a diploma, and a personal letter from Dolly for completing the program.

Here’s How it Works

A community must make the program accessible to all preschool children in their area. The community pays for the books and mailing, promotes the program, registers the children, and enters the information into the database. From there The Dollywood Foundation takes over and manages the system to deliver the books to the home.

Since 2001, the Dollywood Foundation has helped individual communities provide millions of books to children across America. The Imagination Library now provides books to children in over 700 communities, nearly all 50 states and two other countries including Canada and the UK.

About the Books

Penguin Group USA is the exclusive supplier of all of the books for the program. The free books are carefully selected to help develop a child’s literacy and vocabulary skills through age appropriate, developmental reading materials. There is a national committee of individuals who meet each year to review the Library. The committee is composed of representatives from Parents as Teachers National Center, the International Reading Association, the University of Tennessee, Rutgers University, and the teaching profession. New titles are introduced each year so younger siblings will not receive the exact same books as their older siblings.

Visit Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Website »