The worst passwords of 2013

This week's discussion question was about passwords and password strength, and from the responses I've seen so far it was enlightening for some of you to see the relative strength and weakness of your passwords.

I'm just going to leave this image here, it's the 25 worst passwords of 2013. If you read the story at the Tech Times website, they're also the most common. It's not actually a direct match, but it's pretty close. Don't use these passwords! If you are still doing so after class, then you deserve to have all your monkeys stolen.

It's World Password Day!

That's right, in an explosion of serendipity based on our discussion and all the talk of passwords, it turns out today is World Password Day, a day created by Intel and MacAfee to encourage people to change their passwords.

As the linked article states, the common password used last year was '123456,' but that's the most common password EVERY year! Don't use that password!

And as much as I want people to have good, strong passwords, I will be the one dissenting voice and ask that you not actually change it until Friday, after we have talked about what makes a good password. If you read the linked article, however, there is a very, very strong bit of foreshadowing regarding the discussion we'll have.

And really - if you're going to change it, change it to something good!

Write your first program

Way back in the the late '70s and early '80s, as PCs were becoming more popular as consumer devices, the programming language of the time was BASIC, which was an acronym for 'Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.' It's a cumbersome name, but it was the layman's first exposure to programming and to what it could do, and it was easier to understand than the Assembly code that was used by serious programmers, and it's even more understandable than the languages we have today such as C# (pronounced "C sharp") and Java.

It used line numbers in front of every line, usually incremented by 10, so  program might look like:

10 print "Hello World!";
20 GOTO 10

This program would print the phrase 'Hello World' over and over until you stopped it. If you needed to add a line between the two that comprise this program, you could preface it with any number between 11 and 19, but if you needed more than that you were in trouble.

BASIC programs could be very complex, as you can see here. In fact, one of the earliest graphics-capable adventure games ever created for the computer, back in 1979 and on an Apple IIe - while not looking like much - was created entirely in BASIC; it's still considered a programming triumph. Back then we'd never seen anything like it, and it shows the power of the language in capable hands. You can see it in all its glory below.


However, if you are interested, you can experiment with BASIC programming yourself at the Quite Basic website. I'll even give you a program to start with.

When you first visit the site, you'll see a program already typed in, and if you's like to see what it does you can hit the 'play' button right above the code window and it will draw some circles. Or, you can delete all the green code in the text window and type this instead:

10 input "What is your name?"; n
20 print "Well hello there, "; n; "!"

If you type this in the window, then hit the play button right above the window, you will be prompted for your name, and when you type it in it will respond with "Well hello there [you]!".

You can experiment with it, the site is rich with information and examples, you can even create and save projects if you're so inclined. The complex program I linked to earlier didn't work quite right due to some compatibility issues, but I'm working through it to see if I can get it up and running.

Stephen Hawking agrees with me.

We have talked a whole lot over the course of this semester about artificial intelligence; what it means, what it doesn't mean, where it is, where it's going, and it's that last one that has caused us the most uncertainty. Remember, we don't want a toaster that decided for us whether it will make our toast or not.

Now, writing in British publication The Independent, Hawking uses the current Johnny Depp film Transcendence as a jumping off point for his view that AI could be the biggest mistake humanity has ever made.

He worries that as we rush to create technology that can adapt to its environment, analyze gargantuan amounts of data in fractions of a second, and become self-aware, they will begin to form their own identities, their own societies, and their own needs for survival, of which humans may not play a part.

We have seen this theory played out countless times in many movies and works of fiction including I, Robot, I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, System Shock, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many, many others.

Hawking doesn't deny that there is some good in all of the developments we're seeing, but he worries that things like Microsoft's  Cortana and Apple's Siri are just the beginning of an AI arms race that we will all lose.

There is an interesting sidebar in this article at DailyMail about the Hawking post, in which one of the founders of DeepMind, the company formed by a neuroscientist to develop machines that can think and was recently acquired by Google, stated that he feels "human extinction will happen and technology will likely play a part." Google actually had to set up an ethics committee to monitor what Deep Mind is doing, although I suspect they will not be limited in any way.

I for one welcome our new toaster overlords. I hope they heard me. I love toast!

Fun computer-thingy time!

That interesting piece of art you see above is actually the result of a tiny program, IOGraph, that tracks mouse movements and converts them into a graphic visualization. Just double-click the program icon and let it run in the background,  no install necessary. The above graphic is from about two hours of computer use on my laptop, with the lines being mouse movements and the circles indicating when the mouse was at rest and for how long. I don't think the colors are relevant but I'm honestly not sure.

The program window itself is very small and uses very few resources.

If you would like to look around the page then I certainly encourage you to do that, and you can download the program from there, however the big download link is for Linux, while the download links for Mac and Windows are at the bottom of the page and represented by tiny icons. If you just want to download the thing and get to tracking, for Windows you can click here for the .exe file and for Mac you can click here for the .dmg file (right-click and select 'save file as' to control where it downloads).

I...wait, what is this I hear?

No more of this, hopefully.

Can it be? According to this article over on Ars Technica, it appears Cox Communications is going to be rolling out Gigabit service capabilities to all it's residential customers! Fiber speeds, people.

HOWEVER, there are some serious caveats. First of all, it's likely to be very expensive, at least in the beginning; some commenters suggesting around $300 a month, although I have no idea one way or the other.

This is from a Google fiber speed test, and it fills me with envy-based hate, but hopefully we'll be closer.

The other thing is, and this is less of an issue, we're not talking multi-gigabit speeds, only gigabit speeds. Still, that's fiber-level, and it's all we can have anyway since the DOCSIS specifications - protocols (remember those?) for sending data over pre-existing coaxial (remember that?) cable infrastructure - don't allow for multi-gigabit data transmission with current consumer-level cable hardware such as cable modems. That type of hardware is only compatible with DOCSIS 3.0 which allows for gigabit speed, but it would need to support DOCSIS 3.1 to support multi-gigabit speed. But we don't need that now anyway. Let's not get greedy!

This is what I expect now, only without the tie.

Still, the fact they anticipate it will be available to all their customers in all their markets by the end of the year is an incredible start; I wasn't aware of this plan and it seemed to come out of nowhere. I fully support it and hope that the full rollout will eventually drive the cost down and the availability of compatible hardware up.

More tech history

Since I've been on a pseudo-historical bent with the posts this week, I thought I'd just go for broke and make a post about some interesting tech from the days of yore. This isn't about ENIAC or the Analytical Engine, though, this is about the ever-forward march for convenience through consumer tech.

Below we have some attempts at navigation technology. One is in the form of a watch, and one is meant to be mounted in a car. Both have interchangeable maps that are like little scrolls - the auto-mounted one would advance according to the speed of the car, while the watch one had to be advanced by hand. You could buy maps for different locations and change them out as necessary. The car systems were developed in Bulgaria in the 1930s, while the watch, called the 'RouteFinder,' is from England and was developed a decade earlier in the 1920s.

Next, we have the original version of Google Glass, an over-the-eyes TV set, complete with dials and antenna. This was back in 1963, when there were only three channels and no color TV. Plus, you would need to sit very still otherwise the antenna would have a tough time doing their job. (On a related note, if you're a fan of Google+, you may not be one for long).

If it's 1936 and you just can't wait for the Kindle to make its debut, then why not get these glasses which use mirrors to allow you to read in bed without having to sit up, or even look at the book? These should be released now! They're a good idea.

Have trouble focusing? Maybe you're easily distracted? Kids not getting their schoolwork done? Living in the 1920's? Then get them the isolator! It pumps oxygen into a head covering which also blocks all audio stimulus and limits your field of vision. What could go wrong?

Finally, the oldest known selfie, taken almost 200 years ago in 1839 by Robert Cornelius outside his family's store.

All photos from Distractify.

Warhol art found on Amiga disks

Andy Warhol creating art on an Amiga, with Debbie Harry

Back when we were talking about hardware, I mentioned that I had gone to buy a PC and the salesperson asked if I wanted to purchase an additional 25MB (that's megabyte, mind you) hard drive for $500. I said in response that I had no use for something like that because I would never be able to fill up a 25MB hard drive in my lifetime. The 3 1/2" floppies were enough for me.

That was around 1988 and the PC I was buying was a Commodore Amiga 500. Developed by the same company that had created the Commodore 64 - the best selling PC of all time - the Amiga was well-regarded as the machine to beat. It had 512 MB of memory, expandable to 1GB, an unheard of amount at the time. It's graphical user interface (remember that?) was way ahead of its time and its graphics capabilities were so advanced that television networks used it to make the animations for everything from station identification bumps to the animated opening for Monday Night Football. And of course you could just mosey through dungeons if that was your thing.

At the time, these were the most advanced graphics you could get on any PC

Interesting side note: if you ever saw the movie Wayne's World, Dana Carvey's character Garth Algar was actually modeled after his brother, who was one of the developers of the Amiga program Video Toaster, which not only was a video editor used for the kind of animation just mentioned, the software actually won an Emmy!

The reason I bring all of this up is because just recently, art created by well-known pop-culture artist Andy Warhol - on an Amiga computer using the GraphiCraft program - was just discovered on a cache of floppy disks. He made the creations during a collaboration with Amiga, but they weren't discovered until recently.

Andy Warhol art created on the Amiga

This is the first discovery of its kind that I can remember, that being digital art created by a well-known artist on a vintage PC., and I suspect it will be the last. Many people create digital art today, but Andy Warhol was creating it at the forefront of computer graphics capabilities, over twenty years ago.

I just threw this picture in because I like it. That's an Amiga 500.

E.T. Not *that* E.T., *that* E.T.

As some of you likely already know, when movies are released they often have tie-in video games developed to go along with them. Some are very well done, others not so much.

The fact is, there are many, many games that are movie tie-ins, and most of them are understood to be really bad. But which one is the worst, and why do we care?

Among those who know the industry, it is well-known that the worst movie tie-in game ever released was Atari's 1982 release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, programmed solely by Howard Scott Warshaw in six weeks to tie in with the blockbuster movie of the same name. The movie was one of the new breed of blockbusters (and at this time, Steven Spielberg was responsible for all of them, including Jaws and Star Wars).

With a sure-fire epic hit of a movie coming in, Atari wanted to be part of it. They spent a fortune - $25 million - acquiring the rights, and promptly told poor Mr. Warshaw to design, code, and deliver it in only six weeks, far shorter than the 8-12 month development cycle typical at the time.

Not only that, so mismanaged were they back then, they actually produced more cartridges for the console than there were consoles sold! They felt it would push the sales further, but the opposite happened. The game was so confusing, difficult to control and generally unplayable it resulted in significant returns and unsold inventory. In fact, so serious was their error in judgment that this single game was a major cause of the great industry crash of 1983. It would take years and an unknown company from Japan to repair the damage.

Atari just wanted to forget the whole debacle, and for the 30 years since there has been an urban legend among enthusiasts that they buried excess carts in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. And recently, an excavation team with the backing of Microsoft studios decided to film an excursion to the landfill and see if the rumors are true, or finally lay them to rest. And guess what they found?


That's right! A horde of buried non-treasure. E.T. cartridges by the thousands, as well as a few Centipede ones thrown in for good measure.

Now we know. Now the rumors can be laid to rest. The documentary will be aired in the future on Microsoft channels, and it should be interesting to see.

One last thing - none of this was Howard S. Warshaw's fault; he was given an impossible task and did the best he could given the circumstances. He has a strong track record and no one considers this a taint on him personally. I didn't even mind the game that much, but I'm easy to please.

And frankly, there are much, MUCH worse games than this.

Ronald McSwagDonald

Here you McGo. You McWanted to know what the new Ronald Mcdonald looks like, here he McIs in all his McGlory. The McNews was announced via McTwitter, if you would like to read all about it and some of the McReactions and much more about than you could ever McWant, then you can follow this McLink.

In my opinion, he's dressed exactly how I always figured executives at McDonald's dressed anyway.