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 relatively cheap, off-the-shelf computing hardware.
Since I got my Triumph Tiger, I have managed to put just a shade over five thousand miles on the ODO.
Naturally it’s time to really review it.
I’m going to let my 16 year old self interview me.
16yos:Â nice bike, what is it ?
It is a 2013 Triumph Tiger 1050 Sport.
16yos: How fast is it ?
As regular readers will know, on August 1st 2014, an errant driver in a Toyota Aygo hit me while I was riding my bicycle.
The crash was pretty brutal, I broke my collarbone.
The break was a bad one, three surgeries later I am still not fixed.
Today I was seen by the medical assessor who will create the report for the insurance company that will be looking to settle my compensation claim.
This is the final opinion, it has been close to two years, it is time to put this to bed once and for all.Â
I used to think that the next American civil war would be caused by an uprising of the great unwashed. The red-necks, the cowboys, the NRA nut jobs and their ilk.
I believed that one day they would all jump in their good old boy F150 pick-ups, loaded up with more ammunition than the average third world militia owned and head to Washington to teach the ‘guvmint’ a lesson.
I imagined that it would be a fairly short, but incredibly bloody confrontation, resulting in perhaps thousands of casualties, perhaps a lot more if the red-necks managed to make a few bombs.
I suspect that the red-necks would become domestic terrorists, protesting government over-reach, protesting laws that protect those that they hate – basically everyone that is not a  white heterosexual male and that the civil war would probably all be over fairly fast.
That was before Trump.
I see now that this can go two ways.Â
When I was a young child, I had a pair of imaginary Afghan Hounds. Apparently I would pick them up to cross the road and spend time talking to them. As far as I was concerned, they were real.
I cannot remember any of this, but my father will jump at any opportunity to remind me, usually in front of friends about my ‘afdams’. He reminds me of this because he thinks that it is hilarious that a young child would have imaginary friends for some reason. I think that he also likes to remind me that I was a very, very late talker and got many of my words muddled, but that is a whole other subject.
Except, and this is something I do not understand, many people around the world spend significant amount of time, energy and money on their imaginary friend and very few people think that this is not normal.
The working title for my game is ‘Lane Splitaz’.
The game itself is fairly simplistic, you are the rider of a moped and you have to split the lanes of traffic under a variety of conditions against the clock….
Level 1 – The easy intro.
Bike – 50cc scooter, no mirrors.
Traffic – Entirely stationary cars
Gaps – about 2M wide
The only difficult section here is that you pretty much have to be totally flat out the whole time to reach the end of the course.Â
My office is ab
out 37 miles from home.
If I take the train, it takes about an hour and a half. Assuming everything all works out beautifully. Which is pretty much never the case, because this is the train net and this is England. The station is about ten minutes walk away, the train to Stratford takes about 52 minutes, then it takes about five minutes to walk to the DLR, then about fifteen to twenty minutes to reach Canary Wharf.
The problem is, there are several places that a delay is introduced, the trains are often a few minutes late here and there, or they stop outside Shenfield for a while for reasons that appear to be entirely random.
An hour and half is really a very good trip.
Coming home it is even worse, the trains run every ten minutes or so, in theory. But during January, I was delayed more often than not and I failed to get a seat for about 30% of the trips back, at least for the first 40 minutes or so.
There are other options.Â
This is an email that I received from fitness for less a couple of days ago. My immediate response was that this was a very poor phishing attempt that probably used a PDF vulnerability.
Curiousity got the better of me though, because I remember getting an emai form the gym last year about an extra payment that was for ‘gym improvements’.
I cloned and then fired up a virtual machine that was pretty much disposable  and forwarded the email to it.
The pdf was a legitimate one. They were informing me that they are taking a couple of extra ££’s this month.
There are a lot of things wrong here.
The email checked pretty much every known box when looking for suspicious emails.
Fitness for less know my name, yet nothing was personalised.
The email contained nothing at all of value, if you wanted to find out the details you have to open the PDF.
The phraseology feels awkward.
So I replied to the email . I explained that I was not going to open the pdf. I told them that it looked like spam and a very amateurish phishing attempt.
Sadly they just sent me a wall of copy pasted text explaining that they had invested £100k in the website And the payment that they are taking would do towards that.
It’s a shame that they did not spend a few ££s on a decent CRM system that was capable of spitting out personalise emails.
I wonder how many people disregarded the email and are now wondering why their bank account is a little short ??
Many aspects of our lives are protected in one way or another with passwords.
A Password needs to follow contradictory rules.
Many password protected sites attempt to get users to use passwords that adhere to the second rule, yet ignore the first one, by adding a degree of complexity to all passwords.
Ideally you should also add two-factor authentication too, but that is a whole other subject.Â
As I type this, there are a bunch of politicians in London discussing wether or not the UK will go to war with the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL. The proposal is that the UK will help with strikes against the training grounds and the control centres.
Given that ISIS/ISIL have pretty much waged war on the west, on the face of it, blowing them to bits and wiping them off the planet seems like a no-brainer.
The problem is that we, the west, created ISIL in the first place.
How about a little history lesson ?