Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from “a to z”; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.

Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long. The longest password was 30 characters — lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.

The recent hack of the website RockYouexposed around 32 million user passwords, which data security firm Imperva has analyzed to create a list of the worst passwords.

Want to know what terms to avoid?

Here are the top ten most commonly used passwords:

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. Password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

The 10,000 passwords and user names, believed to be booty from a phishing attack, were posted over the weekend to the clipboard site PasteBin. The site owner has since removed the list, but Bogdan Calin of Acunetix grabbed the passwords before it disappeared.

The list included only online account addresses that began with “A” or “B,” suggesting that the list was only part of a larger cache of credentials. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that it had viewed a second list of more than 20,000 account credentials that included Gmail, Yahoo and AOL accounts, and that Google had uncovered a third list containing an unknown number of accounts.

Some of the accounts on the list of 20,000 names the BBC saw appeared to be old, unused or fake, though many were genuine. The list also included Comcast and Earthlink accounts.

Both Google and Microsoft, which own Gmail and Hotmail, MSN and Live.com respectively, have taken measures to block use of the exposed accounts until the legitimate users can reset their passwords.

Huffington Post via Wired

The new edition of Firefox sports an array of features, least of which is an increase in speed — 20% faster than Firefox 3.5, according to Mozilla. It uses Gecko 1.9.2 web-rendering, which improves its load times, startup speed and stability. Javascript execution is faster and smoother as well.

We’ve talked about some of the other new features before, but our favorite has to be Personas, which lets you customize your Firefox with a single click and without a restart. There’s also autocomplete form functionality and full HTML5 support. You can check out all of the new features here.

The Firefox 3.6 beta has been in testing for several months now, but the release candidates only started coming out this month. It looks like the releases went smoothly, so Mozilla is rolling it out for everyone.

You can visit the Firefox homepage to download the newest edition of the browser.

Mashable

The email would have come in with an attachment named something like UPS_invoice_NR34073.zip, with the following text:

Dear customer!

The courier company was not able to deliver your parcel by your address. Cause: Error in shipping address. You may pickup the parcel at our post office personaly! Please attention! The shipping label is attached to this e-mail.

Please print this label to get this package at our post office.

Naturally, this is a virus that causes your machine to repeatedly reboot itself.

Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix.

Fixing the Fake UPS Tracking Nmber Virus

When your PC reboots again, hit the F8 key right before Windows starts so you can access the boot options, and then choose Safe Mode.

Once it starts up into Safe Mode, open the Run box and type in shell:startup to get straight to the startup folder, and then delete the file named raryp32.exe from the folder.

You should be able to reboot your machine at this point, and get back into your system. Make sure to run a full virus scan at this point! If you don’t have an anti-virus application, we recommend the free Microsoft Security Essentials.

Note: These are the steps that worked for us on a test machine here at the office. Viruses change over time, so the same steps may not work for you.

Source: How to Geek

You love your coffee in the office, and some time you just can’t run out to get one, so you brew your own. But you can’t easily get those nice lovely latte foam tops going.  You could purchase expensive machines, but … well, they are expensive.  You can get cheap-oh battery operated ones, but you always are running out of battery juice, and they are not that powerful either.

So purchase one of those non-expensive ones, and follow these steps to give it USB power and more torque.

Tools you will need:
- cheap foamer
- a USB cable that won’t be missed
- pliers and/or sharp knife
- soldering gun
- drill

You can get away without soldering if you want to, just twist-tie your wires.  Messier, but functional.

TechCrunch

The Design Blog

Source: Forbes

Download gui:config Firefox extension

Source: Gizmodo

USB Hourglass from alwynallan on Vimeo.

Source: Gizmodo

Dvice via Businesswire via Gizmodo