Password hashing with bookmarklet

This entry is to explain the concept of password hashing, and empower you with such a tool to have strong and unique passwords per site without having to remember them.

Many users tend to maintain few passwords which they repeatedly use for multiple websites. Even if the password is strong, this has a problem. With so many logins maintained by different website managers, it is inevitable that some of them will get compromised eventually. And the chances are also high enough that the passwords of the hacked sites will get stored as a cleartext.

What that will amount to is that if one of your passwords get stolen, you cannot be sure that the hacker won't get access to other sites which you use.

This is where comes tools like Password Hashing.

A password hasher takes a (possible weak) password, and creates a strong password depending on your password and the domain of the site you are going to log in to.

So for example, if you want to log into Linkedin, and type 'ABC' as password, you click the hasher - and viola - the password get's transformed into something like 'Q%JhLHTJ@4'. Next you want to login to login to Facebook, and type in 'ABC' again, click, and now you get '=ygDD-R46G' - because the generated password also depends on domain.

You need to remember only one password - 'ABC' in this case - which got transformed into something much stronger, and unique per domain - alleviating a lot of security issues. If Linkedin passwords get stolen, you are sure that there's no way the hacker will get access to your Facebook account even though you remembered effectively one password. Also, depending on the number of characters you choose, the generated password can be very strong. For example both the generated passwords above will take roughly 78 thousand years to crack, even assuming a speed of 1 million guesses per second - which is a very high rate of attack for an online server to cope with.

What if someone else also uses the same weak password 'ABC' for Linkedin? He will get a different encrypted password, provided you have customized your password hasher with a strong master password.

You can get your customized password hasher bookmarklet from here - Superpass Password Hasher.

Galaxy S2 ICS 4.0.3 Review

Recently I upgraded my Galaxy S2 to Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3 from Ginger Bread 2.3.6. I grabbed the DXLP7 firmware from xda, and upgraded through Odin. It was painless - even though I started the process with only 42% remaining battery. The upgrade was complete in about 5 minutes, with all my previous apps and settings intact.

Only piece of advice, the upgrade does loose your home page settings. It will help if you create screenshots of your phone before upgrading.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised with the brand new OS, it almost gave me the feeling of having a new phone. There are numerous small upgrades which makes life easier. Though all is not as great as it could be, it is definitely recommended.

Here's my review of the new experience.

Positive -
1. Video/Voice chat in GTalk is finally here in Galaxy S2, officially. Also the interface is revamped as it is the new ICS app.
2. Inbuilt data usage meter/limiter which is very well done indeed. This may well put 3G Watchdog out of business.
3. Folders have small icons of apps inside them.
4. Upload/Download arrows have been added for Wifi connection as well!
5. Improved contacts sync API enables third party apps to integrate better - also now you see which apps have synced with a contact in contact list as icons. (However all is not good on contacts front, read on.)
6. Much better browser. The only thing missing is ability to reflow text when zoomed on the fly. Also you can now install Chrome beta which is exclusive to ICS.
7. A hoard of Developer Options which give you a very good glimpse of what is happening within the phone. Some, like warning when an app takes up CPU cycles for long time, or show CPU usage overlay, are useful to even non developer power users.
8. Face unlock - gimmick, good to have nonetheless.
9. Ability to show a message in locked screen, is useful if your phone is lost and some good soul comes across it :)
10. Rotation animations - Like the Galaxy Tab, now when you change the orientation, whatever is on your screen rotates with a sleek animation.
11. GMail interface is revamped with the new ICS GMail App.
12. Cool screen rotation animation added when you rotate your phone and an application changes from portrait to landscape, or vice versa.


Negative -
1. Contacts & Phone (dialer) are now separated. There is no quick way to move to phone dial pad from contacts anymore! In my mind, this is the biggest and only dumb decision made for ICS.
2. Call recording libraries not implemented yet. There's word that even the call recording giant Total Recall cannot record calls on ICS. If call recording is something you need, do not upgrade.
Update - workaround exists to solve this issue.
3. Contacts now has all (unwanted) gmail addresses. Also I used Social Hub to sync Facebook contacts since it provided pictures, but now it is not supported anymore - I use the Facebook app to sync contacts, and the picture sync does not seem to be working properly.
Update - you can use this free app to sync contacts with hi-res (or optionally low-res) pictures.
4. Camera focus and shutter sounds are no longer linked to System volume (or any other volume), both now play either at max volume (if phone is not on mute), or don't sound at all (if it is on mute).
5. Google Talk now either has option show all friends sorted by name, or to show only 'popular' friends sorted by availability. There's no way to see all friends sorted by availability. Big step back.

Watchouts - it may seem some things are missing, but fear not - merely how to do this has changed.
1. Screenshot - Previously it was Home+Power. Now it is to press Power+VolumeDown simultaneously and hold for a second or two.

Airtal India 3g/gprs configuration

I have been using the Airtel gprs configuration named Mobile Office for a long time. Today I called them up, and changed my 3g plan. As an "welcome kit" they proactively sent me 3 new configurations. When I used them, I could connect to the Internet - but to my utter disappointment, other applications (like Google Maps) were unable to connect anymore!

I figured out that they have given me a WAP configuration.

After much research, and a lot of time with the customer representatives, I could finally piece together the lost Mobile Office configuration (which the customer rep confirmed to be the one to use for 3g, and he himself came up with the settings).

Below I've attached the configurations screenshot from my phone for others to use. Once you feed in the values like this, you'll have a fully working 3g Internet connection - not an WAP or MMS server that they push for unfathomable reasons.

Cheers!

To rename Google Map starred landmarks

If you use Google Maps on Android, you may have seen that you can mark new POIs (by tapping and holding a location, and starring it), but there is no obvious way to rename the marked location - it takes the name as whichever address Google could look up for that place. It cannot be done even on Google Maps on the Internet.


It also appears that customers have been requesting Google for this feature, and it hasn't been added for a long time. Chances are that Google will one day add this feature - though at this moment it seems the engineers in Google are busy with implementing other features that they find motivating and challenging.

Well, there is an obscure but moderately easy way to help you change the name. The trick lies in another service provided by Google, called Bookmarks. If you open Google Bookmarks, it will show all your starred locations. You can then from there click the edit link to rename a location, it will be immediately updated, and shown next time you use Maps either on your phone or online!

If you have never done this before, you would find this feature nifty because even though Android maps does not show the starred locations by the name you have given, you will be able to search quickly by these names in the map!

Hack yourself out of jetlag

There are a lot of ways that you may know about to reduce jetlag. Well some of them worked on me partially, some didn't. I will talk about something else which works like magic -

Starve till it is time to sleep, then eat your dinner. That's all.

When you are starving, a mechanism in your body takes over, which does not allow you to feel sleepy. This has to have an evolutionary root. In the early days - when there was no Mc Donalds - if an animal is starving, it had to find whatever food in order to survive, while sleeping would not be as important a task.

So when you starve, you will find that you are not sleepy. Of course you will have to bear with hunger, but personally I think missing a meal is better than trying to suppress yawns all day during meetings. Till you are hungry, your biological clock will be suppressed - and once you eat and sleep - it will kick start and adjust to that timing. Next day onwards you should feel great!

Try it and let me know if it works for you too.

It is all an illusion

Last week  we considered the repercussions of simulated reality, and we saw that if we live in one of them, we would have no way to figure it out (unless the 'person' who is running the simulation decides to leave hints). I left you saying it gets much worse than that. Well, it gets worse, or more interesting than that, depending on how you view it. Here's the bomb - if you are okay to make certain assumptions, chances are that you are indeed living in a simulated reality.


The argument goes this way. Because of the advances in technology and computer science, humans will eventually gain the ability to simulate full nervous system including the brain in a computer. It could happen within 500 years as some predict, or it could take 5 million years - but if it happens, the astounding conclusion will remain same. Once humans gain the ability to carry out these simulations, they will do so for fun or for research. They will end up running a lot many simulations of their ancestors, to study the past. The number of simulated brains thereby will vastly dwarf the number of real brains in our Universe. Hence chances are if we pick a random brain (or consciousness), it is more likely to be a simulated one than 'real'. You, I, all that you know could be nothing but simulated nervous systems, programmed as a hobby of an advanced being.

Before you start to loose track, let me make one thing clear - even if it is the case, it still means (in a sense) that you are real. What you smell, feel, touch and see, are real - atleast to you. Your thoughts, desires, feelings are still real - just as the brain we discussed was real enough to itself or other brains being simulated with it.

The question that I would pose next is how important is it for the simulation to be actually carried out, versus to just set it up and keep it 'paused', to make it 'real'? Little reflection will show us that nothing should change the reality based on whether it is being run or not.

If we think about the brain being simulated on pen and paper - if the entire configuration of the brain's neurons is known, and written down on a paper, how important is really the act of writing the equations and carrying out the operations on paper to make it real? What difference does it make? Once you specify the initial configuration, the remaining is just result of some mathematics which whether you choose to do now, or later, will lead to the same end result. Just like if you know a stone was thrown up, whether or not you do the calculations (know how to do the calculations) doesn't matter, in a sense that stone is destined to come back because mathematics predicts it. If the initial configuration is known, the stone's fate is fixed and is not going to change. Similarly writing the equations down or not does not change the nature of the reality of the brain - actually animating the reality in the computer or not does not change the reality of the world to the virtual characters in the computer. If you simulate, whatever results will be their reality - and that remains a truth irrespective of if you bother to calculate the results or not.

So in a sense, if you specify the initial configurations of a brain (or universe), the resulting world becomes real. Going one step further, you don't even need to provide the initial configuration in meticulous detail - if you describe an initial condition, which is not too weird and can be possible to detail out following laws of physics - someone (or a powerful computer) can fill out the painful details of the configuration of each and every molecule in one of many ways that fits your description. Then it can start simulating it. For example if you say "an universe where a cup is revolving the sun", the computer can fill in all the molecules in the cup, every particles in the sun, and give them the initial velocities so that the cup is in an orbit around the sun - and then simulate that universe and show you the result. Granted the world is not specified uniquely anymore, but what matters is that it can be done in atleast one way. In a sense, just your describing the world makes it real - in the same way as we discussed how describing an initial configuration (in detail) make it real, even though you may not bother to actually simulate it.

Why is it even necessary for you to think or describe the initial configuration at all? Indeed it is not necessary - if a possible initial configuration exists (i.e. it is does not violate any physical laws), it can be in theory simulated - and again irrespective of whether you choose to do it actually doesn't matter - it doesn't change the 'truth' of events that are bound to happen in the universe - and in a sense it's all real

Let's conclude by revisiting what we have seen.
1. The brain when being simulated on pen and paper through mathematical equations, 'feels' it is real
2. Chances are staggeringly high that we are in fact simulations run by some advanced being (even probably advanced 'real' humans) as their toy universe hobby
3. It can even be possible that we are just someone's imaginations, or worse yet nobody even imagined us, but we 'exist' because the initial configuration for our universe exists in a mathematical sense!

Someone once said, "it is all an illusion". Seems there is some truth there after all.

Geocities.com automatically backed up

If you had a geocities website and you didn't have the chance to retrieve it before geocities died, fear not!

For there is a someone who might have already done it for you - oocities.org

I was surprised to hear some of my colleagues discover my years old site on geocities, and that's how I got to know about it.

They seem to have proactively backed up all (or most) of geocities before it was taken down. The good news is that your data is still there. Not only did they back up and serving they pages, they also allow google to index them - and that's how I could found them.

You simply need to replace "geocities.com/..." with "www.oocities.org/..." and all your old pages will be there. Even the downloads (I tried some .zip files) work!

The bad news is that they do not support modifying anything there yet. So if you want to put a link to your current ventures, you cannot do it. From the FAQ:

For now, we are providing rather an archive and we are not able to give access to our servers for most active sites. But we will be glad to send you your files to enable you to upload and update them somewhere else and to make them available to a bigger audience than here.

You can delete it though, lest you really fear someone will see the embarrassing (ahem) attempts at taming the Internet from a much younger you. To delete something, you simply need to write to them.

We fully respect you copyright and will of course remove your interlectual property from the internet at our earliest convience. Just write a mail to oocities {AT} gmail {DOT} com and it will usually be gone within a few hours.

For me though, it was a nice surprise, and I am happy :) Here's to returning the good old days!

Thank you oocities.org!