What makes you happy ?

I give out passwords daily when they have been lost. I used to just make them up when I started and the event was rare, then I started using a dashboard widget. I forget the name of it, but I had to click generate on the widget, then ctrl-a (or double click) then ctrl-c (or right-click > copy). It’s only a few keypresses but I’m all abut saving clicks where I can these days. And now I have RPG (Widget Edition). What I did in several links I now do in 2. Excellent. And I can change the number of letters, exclude o 0 1 l and that makes it more excellent.

Do I install av software on the reinstalled machine?

Yes:
- viruses are bad
- its expected that you do

No:
- malware is much worse
- av eats more resources than it ‘gives back’ in results
- safe practice is most of the battle against virii anyway

So right now I’m veering to No.
I do have spybot installed and hijackthis available. Clamwin is a purely on-demand solution which sounds okay but I have yet to dig around for reviews and comparisons.

Got av?

I have a directory on this site which is linked from nowhere and I know that for an absolute fact. There is no way it has been indexed. I could put it’s name into robots.txt but then you could look there and see what I don’t want the search engines to see. For the curious, here is my robots.txt

User-agent: HenryTheMiragoRobot
Disallow: /

User-Agent: OmniExplorer_Bot
Disallow: / 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /catch/
Disallow: /gallery-ink/
Disallow: /nota/
Disallow: /stats/

Of those, /images gives you a 403, /catch no longer exists, /gallery-ink is renamed, /stats is really old and the /nota directory will ban you. Really it will – it’s there to catch bad bots. Anyway, the point is that the directory I mean is fairly secure. You can’t find it.

Now to my point. I have a lot of information I need to keep and keep safe. It’s backed up here but I’m thinking of an online backup too. A wiki. But how to keep that safe given there may well be a link somewhere – it would take just the one for the bots. So if I have cpanel information and blogs logins for people – which I do and it’s a lot of people (and no, its not FreshlyPressed clients) – how can I keep them safe?
I like .htaccess file and passwords like g&unbj8[_1-7Xa but I regularly see some people claim that such files are easy to crack/bypass and they offer little security. Do they?
If I was to store your cpanel / blog logins on a site of mine what would be your chosen method of protection? It’s got to be easily usable should I need too. If I said here is the link and cracking it would get you information how would you want that protecting? How would you protect it?

I’m forever telling people that once it’s on the net should must assume it’s there for the world to see and you cannot whinge if that actually happens so I suppose I want to see if I can have my cake and eat it.

What’s the best way I can protect my information?

Yesterday a friend’s site was hacked. She asked me to take a look while it was all still there to try and establish how they did it. Apart from the server access log not going back to the time of the entry there was nothing wrong. Permissions were fine. Datestamps were fine yet they had got in, deleted all the posts and planted their ‘message’. Included in this was a short video clip from a site called (and I am not linking it) w w w o g r i s h c o m. There is a strong warning before you enter that but consider it as extremely NSFW. You do not want that in your work’s browser history. The video clip, judging by the filename, was related to the Chechen war. It was a beheading with a knife and was shockingly graphic and very disturbing. And that image I cannot shake from my mind. It replayed a lot yesterday and even today, over 18 hours later it still pops into my mind. It’s not that we all don’t know these things happen, it’s not that I have not seen graphically shocking images before so … maybe it was the unexpectedness.. horrific images though. In the light of that, given my friend was using what I would consider a decent password (8 random letter / number characters) I am increasing all mine. There may well be another explanation as to why this happened but it’s beyond me how this happened, so from now every password that works on this site is something like this: KLDCoRYzNFUq0OOjQ42D (and no, that’s not one used. You think I’m that stupid ? ;) ) Maybe that’s extreme but hey, why not ?

Ever taken a bicycle tyre off ? And when you put it back on it goes fine until the last bit which is really hard to get back into the groove ? Well my lobes are like that. They are at marginally over 20mm wide and the new wood plugs are around 21 and a bit. But the flared edge on the plugs is closer to 23mm hence the tyre analogy. So the first stage of wrapping wodges of PTFE around an existing plug begins today, that coupled with lots of massaging ..