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In today's virtually connected world computer security is more important than locking your car.  Some basic guidelines are:

• password minimum length of 8 characters.  Passwords with less than 8 characters can be brute forced (systematic guessing) in less than 5 minutes.  8 character passwords will take a very long time.
• password of mixed alphanumeric characters.  The first step in breaking a password is using dictionary words because everyone uses dictionary words.
• Do not use personaly related information for your password like date of birth, dog's name, street address etc.
• Don't give your password out to anyone.  Not even your bank!  NO EXCEPTIONS!
• Please do not use the same password for more than 5 years.  Some recommend changing passwords every three months.  My goal is every two to three years.

For more information, I recommend reading the following articles:

1. Minimal Security part 1:  It doesn't have to be hard 
2. Minimal Security part2:  Going all in  (Having all your eggs in one basket.)

While looking around my blog, I noticed I had a post in draft form from last November. oops. Anyway, here it is.

While I was fumbling along last night on the internet, I ran across a comuter security website. One article in particular is about a honeypot that BBC had connected to the internet. A 'honeypot looks like a normal computer but in reality it has been tweaked to allow every action to be logged so security experts can analyze the perpetraiter be he man or script. The first paragraph of the article can tell you more about honeypots and how they work. Then the article went on to describe several of the attacks, and what they did to the honeypot computer. This is definitely worth a read.

http://passivemode.net/updates/2006/10/14/the-bbc-honeypot.html

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I have update our blogging software so there maybe some wierdness going on. Currently the Summary page is broken, but thats ok because I plan on replaceing it with one of my own. In the mean while you can get to Ardell's blog from my blogrole on the right and please ignore any warnings that show on a web page. I will be updateing the blog templates to support the new version as soon as I can. Anyway, for a list of features new to version 1.2 see here. We skipped 1.1 so I don't know what new features were added to the 1.1 series. See here for a complete list.

Requisite Danger – Ardell 

this is a test of predating an article