Someone who goes by the name of "Hacker Croll" breached the cloud computing accounts of one or more Twitter employees, and obtained access to extremely sensitive personal and corporate documents. I won't link to the documents, but they're floating around. I first read about the breach on the New York Times "Bits" blog. — Read the rest

My latest Guardian column, "When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?" describes the process my wife and I went through when we drew up our wills and realized that our encrypted hard-drives and our network passwords would go with us if we died or were incapacitated, and how important it was for us to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak. — Read the rest

The town of Bozeman, Montana has rescinded its policy requiring job applicants to submit their logins and passwords for all social network sites, email accounts, etc, as part of its background check process.

The city announced in a meeting (PDF) on Monday that it had suspended the practice as of Friday, June 19 and that it would update its hiring procedures within 30 days to determine a more appropriate level of screening for employees…

It's clear now, however, that the city has gotten a major whiff of its own bad PR and has decided to back off.

Cliff sez, "Bozeman City, Montana now asks all applicants for jobs to 'Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, — Read the rest

From Mark Burnett's 2005 book Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, a table of the "Top 500 Worst Passwords Of All Time." (via Beschizza's Twitter)

UPDATE: As the site is down, here's the whole shebang:

Google cryptographer and all-round security expert Ben Laurie's been blogging some great security thinking lately. Today he's got a really fascinating, thoughtful piece about the problems of passwords:

So, where does this leave us? Users must have passwords, so why fight it?

Declan McCullagh reports at News.com that….

Apple has confirmed a security glitch that, in many situations, will let someone with physical access to a Macintosh computer gain access to the password of the active user account.

The vulnerability arises out of a programming error that stores the account password in the computer's memory long after it's needed, meaning it can be retrieved and used to log into the computer and impersonate the user.

Here's a list of default router passwords — ever reset a router to factory defaults and then realize that you don't know what the password is?

Link

(via Schneier)

Danah boyd, the sharpest researcher on social networking services around, posts a great nugget from her field work. Many kids don't worry about losing their passwords for their MySpace and similar service accounts, and happily create a new profile. It gives them a chance to discard all the "Friends they don't know" in their buddy-lists and start over. — Read the rest

Bruce Schneier analyzes the data from a successful phishing attack on MySpace and compares the captured user-passwords to an earlier data-set from a corporation and concludes that MySpace users are better at coming up with good passwords than corporate drones. The article is a great state-of-the-password address, with lots of fun nuggets like "We used to quip that 'password' is the most common password. — Read the rest

An article in the Register today reports that it is possible for more than one person to share a username/password simultaneously on Napster's digital music service, so they don't have to pay for separate accounts.

Over the past couple of days MusicAlly has run several tests, during which we were able to download and stream simultaneously from four separate computers across two separate Internet connections for good stretches of time.

Boingboing reader R.I. Pienaar says:

I noticed this BoingBoing post about people swapping passwords for chocolate. Here is another article from January along the same lines — except no offers for anything, and 90% of people still gave passwords.

Link. — Read the rest

According to this Security Pipeline article, nearly three quarters of office workers in an impromptu man-on-the-street survey were willing to give up their passwords when offered the bribe of a chocolate bar. Heh. Heaven only knows what they'd fork over for venti latte with extra foam. — Read the rest

A crook in NYC installed keyloggers on Kinko's machines across the city, using the captured data to thieve the identities of Kinko's customers, including over 450 banking passwords.

Link

(via Crypto-Gram)

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Shopping for clothes and paying your bills online sure makes life easier, but it often leaves you susceptible to dangerous digital forces looking to steal your personal data (more like your cat videos!), — Read the rest

It's hot. The windows are all down, the AC barely works, it's 110˚F in the shade and 94% humidity. Everything is terrible and you still have another 6 hours of driving ahead of you. This stretch of highway, there's nothing but mini malls and gas station exits. — Read the rest

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We live so much of our lives online, and while that's often convenient and more fun, there are dramatic downsides. — Read the rest

The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination isn't just for Donald Trump and his unpleasant ilk; it also covers ordinary people who refuse to surrender their passwords to inquisitive law enforcement officers. Today, the Supreme Court of Utah unanimously ruled that people are within their rights to refuse to disclose their phone passwords to law enforcement. — Read the rest

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From answering work emails and building resumes to booking plane tickets and shopping for that upcoming holiday party, what don't you do online these days? — Read the rest

The MIT Technology Review recently published a great piece about the history of .tk domain names. Initially, it tugged a nostalgic string in my heart — there was a time, particularly in the early '00s, when I remember so many websites having .tk — Read the rest