White Wizard

How Nerdy Are You?

Stupid Password

Grrrr. I was going to blog about something else, but I am frustrated right now because I couldn’t remember my own password to get into my own blog! Argghh!

So, how many passwords do you have? Let me count mine:

• I occasionally use one from when I was in high school
• I have a standard one that everyone related to me knows
• The bank
• My university
• My job
• The Bookexchange
• My gmail account
• Another bank
• Amazon.com
• And one more that I think I’ve only used once

Let’s see, that makes 1, 2, … 10 passwords! Bleh. Oh wait, I have to remember another one to administer the bookexchange, so, that makes 11. Grrrr.

Oh, here’s a little something: Say you sign up for a forum, for example, this forum. After you sign up, if you forget your password, you can request that it be sent to you via email.

Now think about that. Hmmm. Okay, what this most likely means is that your password is stored in plain text on their database! Now, suppose you are the conniving forum administrator (just for a second). It would be fairly easily to take your username and password that I have in my database and go try ebay, paypal, a couple bank sites… you get the picture?

So, moral of the story: if you are a regular user: never use your high security password to register for a site that you don’t trust or you aren’t sure about (online forums, clubs, blogs, ).

mendozamission.com

So, I’ve been working away at my mission site: mendozamission.com. Today I was able to do the following:

• Change the member list page so it included a link to the missionary page
• Fix the login date/time error.
• Include a link to gallery2
• Set the default value in the database for the posted on date for news items (and comments)
• Subscribe to the forums so I can see when someone posts
• fixed a password bug

I think the site is coming a long quite well. I still need to install a newsletter module so I can spam, I mean, email everyone

Update: well, I just installed the newsletter, so, ha!

White Wizard

Okay, This is my first personal blog. We’ll see how long it lasts.

You may be wondering why my blog is called “White Wizard”. Well, that is because I was given that name when I took the MBA core classes Fall 2004. I came to be known as the tech guru in the core (amongst the students in my same section) and they started calling me the “White Wizard” (in reference to Gandalf). I guess they figured I was pretty good at solving their computer problems