Digital Samurai

Move Over Cell Phones and Land Lines

Almost everyone now has a cell phone, with an increasing number of users also subscribing to a Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) account of some kind (think Skype). With these accounts come monthly service charges and the need to painstakingly monitor your “minutes,” to make sure you don’t go over your monthly limits.

Google first entered the voice arena with Google Voice, which provided Google users with the ability to get a local phone number of their choice, and to integrate the service with their Gmail account. As of yesterday, Google has added the ability of Gmail users to place calls directly from their Gmail account, using your computer’s microphone and speakers, or a headset. To say the service took off might be an understatement.

Google, offering free calls in both the U.S. and Canada, made over 1 million calls in the first 24 hours the service was offered. To put the numbers in perspective, it’s like 1 out of every 3000 phone calls made yesterday in the U.S. were made using Google.

That’s amazing. It will be interesting to see if volume of calls made through Google stay at this level or even increase.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Super Password

So what happens when we take some time off for vacation? You don’t get any blog posts. That should be pretty obvious by now, but we’re back to work for the near term.

The Georgia Institute of Technology just published a report that indicates we should all be considering 12-character passwords for the future. CNN commented on the report, which cracked 8-character passwords with ease using a PC graphics processing unit (GPU) that costs just a few hundred dollars. If you have ever purchased a computer with multi-core graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD’s ATI division, then you have the horsepower to brute-force passwords in a relatively short period of time.

Why are 12-characters recommended? It’s all about the mathematics. Clusters of graphics cards can crack an 8-character password in less than two hours, but using the same processing power would take 17,134 years to crack a 12-character one.

We’ve been using 10 and 12-character passwords for some time. It looks like it will be 12 from now on.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Office for Mac

Microsoft has announced an October availability of Office 2011 for the Mac, although we wonder why Redmond even bothers to produce products for the Apple crowd. It seems that most Mac fans generally bash Microsoft so we’re not sure where the anticipated revenue stream is coming from.

Office 2011 for Mac will only be available as a 32-bit version. Too bad there will be a limit as to how much you can use the sinfully overpriced RAM from Apple. [tongue in cheek]  Microsoft is even recommending the 32-bit version for Windows users unless you have very high data requirements. Outlook (instead of Entourage) will be available in the new version along with support for .PST files. Prices start at $99 for the academic version up to $279 depending on the edition purchased. Buy Office 2008 for Mac today and you’ll get a free upgrade to 2011 when it is available.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Latest iPhone No Longer Safe

Now that the Library of Congress has granted an exemption from the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for jailbreaking cell phones, it didn’t take long for Apple’s latest iPhone to become the next victim.

Until recently, Apple’s iPhone 4.0 had not yet been jailbroken. Now it’s just like all of its predecessors. For added convenience, the “hackers” have set up a website called JailBreakMe (www.jailbreakme.com) that a user can visit from the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, compatible with devices running firmware 3.2 or higher, and have their device be jailbroken in a matter of a few clicks. The website exploits a vulnerability in the MobileSafari software, and installs software on your device that allows you to download, install and run third-party software previously blocked by Apple.

So, for those users who think their new iPhone is secure from jailbreaking, that’s no longer the case. It never seems to take long . . .

-John and Mike

(703)359-0700

digitalsamurai@senseient.com

www.senseient.com