msm1267 writes “Many popular online services have started to deploy password strength meters, visual gauges that are often color-coded and indicate whether the password you’ve chosen is weak or strong based on the website’s policy. The effectiveness of these meters in influencing users to choose stronger passwords had not been measured until recently. A paper released this week by researchers at the University of California Berkeley, University of British Columbia, and Microsoft provides details on the results of a couple of experiments examining how these meters influence computer users when they’re creating passwords for sensitive accounts and for unimportant accounts.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to Twitter, it was hacked and 250K accounts were affected, so they received emails from the company to change their password. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time it was a real hack, rather than a blend of real hacks and “false alarm” blast of emails like last time. Way to start off our weekends, Twitter. Who knows if you’ll even get the email from Twitter about it, I know that I filter all of those things out. You can read all of the details about the hack and the company response here. I find it really confusing when anything like this happens, because it feels like companies try to diminish the perception of the impact of the situation. Fact of the matter is, its users are seeing sad tweets from their friends about how they got hacked. I even had one person tell me that they felt like they weren’t cool enough because they didn’t get hacked. Instead, or in addition to, just go change your password. We’re all cool enough to get hacked. The number, 250K affected, seems a bit too tidy to me, and I’m not saying that Twitter is lying, I’m just saying that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Twitter also suggests this course of action, which is way too much for most people’s brains to process on a Friday: We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers in their browsers. Sure, OK. Happy Tweeting (Maybe)! While you’re at it, change all of your passwords for everything. It’s a good thing to do once in a while, especially if you use the same one for every single site you log into. [Photo credit: Flickr]
Today, 
It’s been over 24 hours since LinkedIn revealed that “some” of their users’ passwords were indeed compromised in that massive leak, and while the investigation is still on going LinkedIn director Vicente Silveira once again took to the 
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