Month: August 2016

Squidly Mc.Squidface

In motorcycling terms, a squid is the name given to bad rider that wears minimal protective clothing and rides a bike way beyond their abilities.

The term ‘squid’ refers to the way that they look after they have been scraped up off the road.

Sadly, motorcycle licensing in the US is very bad. A license is obtained simply by completing a safety course which contains no street riding and no speeds beyond about 25mph.

Other than a small insurance discount for having passed a test, there is pretty much no incentive. You can simply walk into a dealer and buy the fastest bike on the planet and ride out. Obviously a riding buddy can teach you all you need to know in a few minutes because riding a motorcycle is dirt easy. Right ???

Sometime a wannabe rider will ask experienced bikers for their opinion on a good starter bike. Almost without fail the conversation goes like this.

Q. Hey guys I’m looking to start riding, I’m thinking about getting a Kawaduci 1000RRR as a first bike, is there anything (sic)  I need to know ?

editors note: The more R’s in a bike model name, the more it is aimed at racing use rather than street use. Additionally, 1000cc bikes make 150-200hp and are absolute spaceships, our wannabe rider here is aiming way too high.

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Even with a password manager….

Passwords are rubbish.

They are an inherently flawed method of securing your information.

Don’t believe me ?

If your password is less than seven characters long, it can be cracked in minutes using cheap off-the-shelf computing hardware.

If it is longer than seven, but still a word that appears on a word list, even if you substitute e’s with 3’s and sprinkle capital letters in there, again it is rubbish.

There are wordlists out in the real word that have  60 billion words on it, while that number might seem high, a dedicated pawed cracking machine that costs less than $5000 will check 6 billion combinations per second.

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