Simple trick to make your accounts more secure
Q: what do the hacking of Sarah Palin's email account and the exposure of hundreds of confidential Twitter documents have in common?
A: Hackers broke into both the same way—not by knowing the password, but by figuring out the answers to security questions.
While people have gotten better about choosing good passwords, those are just the keys to the front doors. What happens when you've forgotten your key? You get in through the "back door", which is usually locked with questions like, "What street did you grow up on?" and "What's your favorite food?"
Many of the answers to these questions can be guessed with clever Googling. And if you've ever used a Facebook Quiz or App, you've granted it access to a wealth of personal data. Whether or not a developer has evil intentions, that data goes into a database somewhere, and THAT database could get hacked (Facebook's terms of service won't stop the leaks).
If you assume the worst—that the answers to those questions are discoverable—then how can you secure your account? Like this:
Prioritizing Podcasts with Google Reader
Summary: my story about how incoming podcasts list became overwhelming, so I tamed them using Google Reader. Essentially, I use Google Reader to scan my “podcast inbox”, star only the ones I want to hear, and use that as my personal, filtered podcast.
The problem—there are a ton of great podcasts to listen to. Some of them are so good that I listen to every episode. But others are better suited to grazing, for instance the NPR Most Email Stories podcast or Science Friday. Eventually I had so many feeds that just navigating between them became a chore. Something had to be done…
So I started by subscribing to my podcast feeds in Google Reader…
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