Cracking a Lost Wireless Network Password

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GoddessJ’s sister (“D”) just had a minor surgery yesterday, and the doctors recommended that she not be left alone. Her husband couldn’t stay with her today, so we and GoddessJ’s parents decided to take it in shifts. It’s not a major inconvenience for any of us; her parents are retired, GoddessJ isn’t working at the moment, and I can work anywhere so long as I have my laptop and Internet access.

It’s that last bit that poses the problem. They have a wireless network, and they gave me permission to use it the last time we were there, but they didn’t know the network password — her husband had set it up, and couldn’t remember what he had set it to, other than “something to do with hockey.” So before we left, I studied the problem carefully. Continue reading ‘Cracking a Lost Wireless Network Password’ »

Fowarded E-Mails

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One of my sisters sent me a very interesting optical-illusion e-mail recently. I enjoyed it quite a bit. But like most such messages that I see, it was forwarded, and had several different headers, and all of the e-mail addresses it had ever been sent to were intact and visible in them.

People… please, please, please don’t make it easier for spammers to get the e-mail addresses of your friends and family. If you really must forward a message, or send out a mass e-mail of your own, do it the smart way: use the BCC field instead of the TO or CC fields, and strip off any previous forwarding headers before you send it.

TrueCrypt 5.0!

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Last night, just after midnight, my RSS reader picked up a notice that the new 5.0 version of TrueCrypt (my favorite cross-platform drive encryption program) is now available. It has several very neat-sounding new features, including the ability to encrypt the system drive (under Windows), a standard GUI under Linux (it only had command-line support under Linux before), a MacOS version, and lots of new features!

I plan to explore the new features further at some point, but the Linux GUI (the only one I’ve tried so far) is pretty neat. 🙂