Domain: ivory.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to ivory.org.
Comments · 8
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Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett
There are also those who espouse the view that free will must exist because of the lack of supernatural beings, aside from existing in the imaginations of humans. The fact that it is possible to hold this view and kick ass at the same time makes it all the more appealing.
For those of you who would point out that Neil Peart was reading lots of Ayn Rand at the time -- I already know this. At least he chose to be influenced by the parts that make sense.
Mal-2 -
Re:"Force"?
Whisper might be what you need - then you only ever need one password to get at all your passwords, and you can manage your password changes yourself.
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Re:Automated interface analysis?
This is one of the things that bothers me the most about somefree(freedom or cost) software. The usability is not there. I ran into a case of this just this weekend.
We wanted to put strong passwords on our financial accounts because of a security failure on one of our email accounts. I checked sourceforge for some good programs that will generate and store strong random passwords. KeePass looked good, so we tried it out. Create an entry--OK. Generate a password with cool user-controlled methods of randomness--OK. Try to copy that password to paste it into the change password dialog on my financial site--HA HA, Not a chance! Why would someone want to do something like that? As they were generated, they would not display on the screen. They were in "******" characters and you could not select or copy them. There didn't seem to be any way to copy this password out of this program and into a web browser where I'm trying to log in or change a password.
I went through all the sections in the help files and found nothing useful. There was even a FAQ in the help files. I would have thought, "How do I USE these wonderfully generated passwords?" would have been a good question to have there, but no dice. So I asked a web designer friend of mine if he had any recommendations of password programs, and he mentioned Whisper 32, which I tried. It works great. It generates the passwords, and you can copy them and paste them into your web browser, just like people would actually want to do. -
Password Programs and Patterned Passwords
I use two schemes to help me out. First, I use Whisper to store my passwords. It's fairly secure, requiring a password to access, though I suppose it can be opened using various attacks on the MS Access database file password storage. Second, I use the password generator in Whisper to create patterned passwords. My employer requires 10-digit passwords with at least one number and a combination of upper and lower case. From Whisper, I use the pattern cvcvcvcV## ("c"onsonent, "v"owel, capital "V"owel and two numerals). This gives me a password which is easy to remember because it can be pronounced. Alternating consonents and vowels generally makes a pseudo-word, for example: romabuL45. You can "say" this better than qt1l#Gikx at least in my opinion.
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Password for passwords
My important passwords I commit to memory, but ones that aren't so important I toss in a little program I found a few months ago called Whisper. Whisper stores usernames/passwords, will generate random passwords, and allows you to copy a password to clipboard quite easily. Anyway, the program lets you password protect your password file, so I did that. A few days go by and I open my password file and type in my password. "Wrong password. Failed to open document."
Yeah, that sucked. -
Re:didn't see that coming...
Given his 50% success rate, it's probably the same size. "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small..." (Jefferson Airplane)
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TclockEX, Whisper, Transparent, PFE
Great free programs I always install on windows boxes:
TclockEX A genuinely useful enhancement to the taskbar clock. It can show the date and has a resource monitor option, so you can tell at a glance if it's getting to be time for a pre-emptive strike (reboot). Very useful for all versions of windows.
Whisper Whisper is a password manager for windows. It's convenient to have all your passwords stored in one place, and the program itself is intuitive to use.
Transparent Makes icon text backgrounds transparent on the desktop. It's a small thing, but it really improves the look of windows. I've used it on 98 and 2000 and it works well.
Programmer's File Editor For people who need more power than notepad but are unwilling to learn vim, there's PFE, a very nice text editor. It's not vim, but it sure beats the hell out of notepad. -
Win32 program
If you're on 32-bit Windows, Whisper 32 is fairly decent. Free, as in beer.