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

Source: Gizmodo

A lot of time this works really well and will significantly reduce the size of your PDF file. When you go to File – Print, choose Adobe PDF from the drop down list of printers:

Image Source: Adobe Blogs

Amazingly enough, I’ve been able to shrink a 20 MB PDF file down to 3 MB just by using this method. Not really sure what it does to shrink it, but it works, especially if you have a good number of images that are eating up a lot of space.

Method 2 – Use Adobe Acrobat PDF Optimizer

Since version 7 of of Adobe Acrobat, there is a new option in the Advanced menu called PDF Optimizer.

Now you’ll be brought to a screen that has a whole bunch of options to configure!

Click on the Audit space usage button in the top right to get a detailed listed of each component of the PDF file and exactly how much space it is using:

As you can see, there are six different things you can do to make a PDF file smaller including optimizing or down-scaling images, reconfiguring scanned pages, adjusting fonts, adjusting transparency, discarding objects, and cleaning up the PDF file.

Under Images, for example, you can downsample and compress the images to save space. This is really useful, especially if your images are at a really high resolution that is not needed. For view on the screen, you only need 72 pixels.

If you scanned a bunch of pages into your PDF, then click on the Scanned Pagesoption and mess around with the sliding bar, which goes from Small Size to High Quality. Adjust as needed.

The Discard Objects and Discard User Data are two really useful cleanup options for PDF files. You can basically get rid of all the extra junk that is normally stored in every PDF file. You can remove tags, flatten form fields, etc.

For Discard User Data, you can get rid of comments, document information, metadata, object data, file attachments, data from other applications, and more.

Finally, the Clean Up tab does a few more housekeeping tasks like compressing the entire file and optimizing the PDF for fast web view.

The best thing to do is to play around with all the settings to see what works best for your particular PDF file. Enjoy!

Courtesy: Online Tech Tips

Searchbar Autosizer homepage @ MozDev

Install Searchbar Autosizer v1.4.5 @ Firefox Add-ons

Description of user interface

Configuration

Call Recording

• - Automatically record calls / Manually record calls.
• - Record both sides / Only record my side / Only record remote side.
• - Recording folder.

MP3 Quality

• - Recording Mode. It’s support Mono/Stereo/Joint Stereo Mode.
• - Recording Bitrate. Choice of bitrates from 32 bits upto 256 bits.
• - Recording SampleRate.Choice of samplerate from 16kHz upto 48kHz.

Download iFree Recorder

Most people are intimidated by the words “encryption” because it involves fancy algorithms and names like “WPA, EFS, SHA1, etc”. However, there’s a very easy way to encrypt a USB drive in Windows.

If you want to encrypt files on your computer, read my previous post on how toencrypt your hard drive using BitLocker. If you have lots of sensitive data on alaptop, you should read those articles on how to encrypt your computer data.

Ok, so getting back to USB drives! We will use Windows Encrypting File System to create an encrypted folder on a thumb drive that only one user account on one computer can read. Later we’ll talk about how you can view those files on another computer, but for now we’ll focus on just having a secure USB drive.

Step 1 – Format USB drive in NTFS format

Firstly, you have to make sure the USB drive is formatted in NTFS format. Most USB drives are formatted in FAT16 or FAT32 format, which does not support encryption at all.

Luckily, I have already written a post on how to format a USB drive in NTFS format, which walks you through the process step by step.

Step 3 – Create an Encrypted Folder

Ok, now that your USB drive is in NTFS format and all the data has been erased, we can setup a folder that will contain all the encrypted data.

What I like about this method is that you can store all the sensitive files in the encrypted folder, but store other files normally outside the folder. That way, you can still pop the USB drive into someone else’s computer and they can view all thefiles not in the encrypted folder.

Go to My Computer, open the flash drive, right-click and choose New Folder. Name the folder anything you want, but try not to make it obvious that it has sensitive data otherwise people might be more inclined to try and get in.

Now right-click on the new folder and choose Properties. Click on the Advancedbutton in the Attributes section.

Now check the Encrypt contents to secure data box. Click OK and click OK again to close out the dialogs.

Now you’ll see the folder is in green, which means the data is encrypted. That’s it! Now you have a folder on your USB drive that is fully encrypted and viewable only by your user account on that one computer.

Next week, I’ll talk about how you can export the EFS certificate from one computer to another, so that you can view the files on more than one PC. Enjoy!

Source: Online Tech Tips

This is a guide on how to change a drive letter in Windows XP for an external device. Here’s a common problem that I have seen: Plug a USB flash drive into your computer and it’s says ready to use, but for some reason nothing shows up in the list of drives. Take it out, plug it back in and still nothing shows up!!! What the heck is the problem? Well, it could be several things, but the most common issue is that the drive letter Windows is trying to assign to your device is already taken by some other drive or maybe mapped to a network drive.

Sadly, Windows XP does not figure this out itself (which is should) and your drive is basically lost in la-la land somewhere. In order to fix it, we need to go to Computer Management and change the drive letter there manually. There are two ways to get to the Computer Management dialog in Windows, one through Control Paneland the second by right-clicking My Computer and choosing Manage.

Right-click My Computer

Computer Management in Administrative Tools

Click on Disk Management under the Storage section and the right side will show you all of the current drives and partitions on your drive. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, just find the drive you are looking for in the graphs at the bottom. They are usually named Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM, CD-ROM1, etc. If you’re looking for a USB flash drive, you’ll see the word “Removable” underneath Disk X.

As you can see from my computer, I plugged in a USB flash drive and it’s currently assigned drive letter is F. If you want to change this, right-click in the white space to the right of the drive letter and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Click the Change button in the dialog box and then pick a new letter from the drop-down list. Just for your info, the Mount in the following NTFS folder option is used if you had right clicked on an external hard drive and instead of giving it a drive letter, you wanted to just have it show up as a folder on your current hard drive. That means you could create a folder in My Documents called pictures that actually points to another hard drive instead of one where all of your My Documents are currently stored.

Click Ok twice and your drive should now have the new letter assigned. Usually, if you USB stick was not showing up before, once you change the letter, it will automatically pop up and ask you what you want to do. And that’s about it! You can also use Disk Management to format disks, determine the type of File System, and see the amount of free space available.

It’s important to note that all of the username/password accounts listed on bugmenot are added by users such as yourself. If you can’t find a working login for a site then you are encouraged to register with that site (using fake details of course) and then add the username/password to bugmenot for other users to use. Never enter your real login details into bugmenot- everyone else will be able to see them!

BugMeNot