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Passwords are a nuisance. As a security technology, they have many problems.

1. If they are complicated, or consist of meaningless strings of symbols, we forget them.
2. So we pick strings that are easy to remember, our children’s names or our birthdates. Then either
   1. They are easy for attackers to guess, and aren’t secure at all, or
   2. (As now commonly happens) the site won’t let us use such a simple password, and we have to come up with something stronger.
3. If we try to make passwords easier to remember by using the same password for multiple sites, then the security of the password is only as strong as the security with which the most amateur of those sites protects the password data. So if you are asked to create a password for access to a web site that seems sketchy, don’t use the same password as you use for your financial data, because it could be a scam; the scam artist may be able to figure out your bank or credit card number from a statement you threw out in the trash and may try the password with that account.
4. Because passwords are a nuisance to keep re-entering, single passwords sometimes give access to lots of information that could be split up to increase security.
5. For the same reason, some services don’t log you out after a period of inactivity. This is one of the worst security problems with Facebook. If you forget that you have left yourself logged in and allow someone else to use your computer, even days later, they have access to your profile — and also to all the information that your login enables you to see about your “friends.”
6. Systems with default passwords, so that they work “right out of the box” but advise you to change the password for security reasons, are extremely vulnerable. Anyone who knows the default password, perhaps because they used to work with the supplier or have used the device or system themselves, or can guess it ¬†(“admin” and “0000” are good to try),¬†can break into yours if you take the easy way. Here is a nice story about someone stealing gasoline from a pump that had not had its security code reset by the gas station proprietor.

Personally, I have several passwords, and I try a pyramid approach: A low-security password for a large number of sites that have no information on me worth protecting; a high-security password for a very small number of sites with very valuable information, such as credit card companies and banks; and a couple of layers in between. A lot of people I know seem to use a scheme like this.

But here’s a nice idea used by one fellow I know. He uses an algorithm to combine the name or URL of the web site with some personal information to produce site passwords that are different for every site. To take an overly simple example (he didn’t tell me his exact method), if this site (bitsbook) needed a password, I might append my first name to it, to create the password “bitbookharry”. That would be too simple — you’d need to break up the words, insert some nonalphabetic and capitalized characters, etc. But the basic idea of just having to remember a single algorithm, which you can apply to the URL along with some easily remembered personal information, sounds like a good trick.

But really, we need a different security mechanism (and there are some; perhaps more on that later).

The New York City police department has established a Real Time Crime Center, to which citizens are encouraged to send cell phone photos of crimes. You can also text “CRIMES” with your tips. Mayor Bloomberg spoke enthusiastically about the new unit, but urged common sense. “If some big hulking guy is coming at you with a hatchet,” he said, “I would suggest you don‚Äôt take out your camera and try to take a picture.”

Doubtless this will help solve some crimes, as it perhaps did in the case of Jeffrey Berman reported in Blown to Bits. Will it have any unforeseen consequences? How will we feel about vigilante citizen jaywalking enforcers who snap pictures of us crossing the street at the wrong place and build up digital police files of our persistent lawlessness?

The Washington Post reports that there are competing web sites for women who want to track their menstrual cycles online: mymonthlycycles.com and mon.thly.info. Also Bedpost for tracking your sex life, and many other tools for recording and analyzing the ordinary moments and extraordinary moments of your daily life.

Personally, no matter what the sites’ privacy policies say, there are some data I wouldn’t put in “the cloud”!

There is a nice review of Blown to Bits in the Asian Review of Books this morning.

Chris Soghioian reports on a little-known industry that does something you might have thought illegal: provide to governments detailed data, including graphical presentations, of who is calling whom. The companies data-mine phone records to infer clusters. The story shows an example, taken from a corporate presentation, of a Google Earth map of Indonesia mashed up with phone data on 50 million people, crunched to reveal small groups of dissidents with a habit of calling each other.

But it couldn’t happen here, I hear you cry. If the government wanted this work done for them, where would they get the data? The cell phone companies, such as Verizon and Sprint, can’t legally turn it over without a court order, right?

Well, sort of right. But it turns out that wiretap laws don’t protect the data when it’s in the hands of other companies that the cell phone companies use for services related to your phone calls. For example, the cellular carrier doesn’t actually own any cell phone towers; it relies on companies such as Tower, Inc. for those. Tower, Inc. passes the phone calls on to the cellular carrier for processing, but isn’t covered by the same restrictive laws about use of that data. According to the article, suppose the National Security Agency wanted to conduct surveillance of the phone habits of U.S. citizens within the U.S.

Thus, while it may be impossible for the NSA to legally obtain large-scale, real-time customer location information from Verizon, the spooks at¬†Fort Meade¬†can simply go to the company that owns and operates the wireless towers that Verizon uses for its network and get accurate information on anyone using those towers–or go to other entities connecting the wireless network to the landline network. The wiretapping laws, at least in this situation, simply don’t apply.

And with the gag orders attached to data requests in the Patriot Act era, no one would probably be the wiser if this were happening right now.

Blown to Bits readers of chapter 4 know that we should stop to think before acting on the information produced by search engines.¬† Yesterday, a Florida stock analyst didn’t stop¬† ‚Äî and United Airlines stock lost 75% of its value, a billion dollars, in 15 minutes.¬† The stock largely recovered, down only 10% by day’s end but investors who sold at the low are stuck; and other airline stocks were affected as well.

Yesterday’s panic was the result the Bloomberg News Wire printing a one-line note about a Florida investment newsletter’s note about an article on the web site of a Florida newspaper reporting that United had filed for bankruptcy.¬† The article, which originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune, was accurate reporting, except that it was from 2002, and it was located in the archive section of the Florida paper’s web site.

It seems that an analyst at Income Securities Advisors did a Google search for “bankruptcy 2008”, which turned up the story, and then passed it on without checking it or, one might suspect, without reading it carefully.¬† In the inevitable finger pointing, one of inevitable finger pointees is Google, with the newspaper asking how a link to a 6-year-old story from their archive got returned from a query indicating “2008”.¬† The article didn’t even appear in yesterday’s newspaper, but, as Google points out in its defense, was listed as one of the “most popular” on the paper’s web site, which the Google search engine took as an indication that the article was, well, popular.

One might imagine a more careful search search engire, one that would double check the actual dates of news article, or even identify their original sources.¬† But more to the point, it wouldn’t hurt to have more careful people, especially those who are being paid to supposedly analyze information, not just uncritically accept and pass along the results coughed up by mysterious computer programs.

According to the president of the securities company, his researcher didn’t verify the story before passing it on because, “we are a reading service,” and since the story appeared in the paper “I don’t think that calls for us to check it out.” (As quoted in the Chicago Tribune.)

That’s an interesting view: it’s OK for¬† professional analysts to do their job by typing in search queries and passing on the results without having to apply any judgment.¬† I bet we could get a computer program to do that.¬† We could call it “Google”.

A law firm acting on behalf of the Church of Scientology has sent more than 4000 takedown notices over a twelve-hour period this past weekend, demanding that videos and other information critical of the Church be removed from public view. The Church of Scientology is famous for this abuse of the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Two stories from today’s news underscore the high tensions and short tempers surrounding the commerce in bits.

As we noted a few days ago, the McCain campaign received a cease and desist letter about its use of the song “Barracuda” at the RNC. According to Reuters, singers Nancy and Ann Wilson issued a statement that¬†”The Republican campaign did not ask for permission to use the song, nor would they have been granted that permission.”

But the situation may not be so simple. According to the RNC,¬†”The McCain campaign respects intellectual property rights. Accordingly, prior to using ‘Barracuda’ at any events, we paid for and obtained all necessary licenses.”

And in any case, the article goes on to explain, “the song is licensed for public performance under a blanket fee paid by the venue to ASCAP, the firm that collects royalties on behalf of composers and copyright owners.” Makes sense that the center would have paid a one-time fee so whoever rented it could play anything they wanted.

The moral here may just be that copyright law gives copyright owners such absolute control over their bits, and there have been so many frivolous takedown notices, that copyright holders assume they can do anything they want, such as to object to a performance for political reasons even when they have legally assigned their rights to others.

In other copyright news, a company has announced that it will sell for $30 what it claims is a legal DVD copying program for Windows computers. (Illegal programs for doing this are widely available on the Net; the New York Times article names a couple.) RealNetworks believes that a recent court ruling opens the door to lawful DVD copying just a crack. The copy could be played only on the computer that was used to make it, or up to four others for which separate license fees would have to be paid. The content industry is not amused, and it looks like another battle over copying technologies, like those we lay out in Chapter 6, will soon be joined.

If you want to know why not, read “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder,” an opinion piece in today’s New York Times. It’s about the unforeseen consequences of the Bayh-Dole act, which was meant to provide a profit motive to universities, to encourage them to transfer their scientific and technological discoveries to private enterprise as quickly as possible. As a result, the spirit of science and applied science has changed. One of the first thing that happens to students today is that they are informed that the university has rights to inventions and discoveries that come about as part of sponsored research. When I wrote some math software in 1968 that enabled users to write equations in ordinary 2-D notation and to see the graphs of those equations on a screen, I don’t think I had even heard the word “patent.” It was just not part of the vocabulary — certainly not the university’s possible interest.

If the Internet protocols were developed in a university setting today, the university would almost have to patent them and then give a single private company a long-term exclusive license to use them. The Internet would not be common property, and research at other universities would be restricted by the legal requirement that they negotiate use of the patent rights.

It’s a new world, and not a better one. Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc., which is mentioned in the article, is also excellent, even though it’s a few years old now.

Caylee Anderson is the Florida toddler whose mother Casey failed to report her missing for a month and who has been jailed for child endangerment (she’s out on bail). No one yet knows what happened to the little girl, but CNN reports this tidbit today:

Authorities said they have found traces of chloroform in the car Anderson drove and Internet searches of chloroform Web sites on her computer.

Searching computers is as much a part of criminal forensics now as searching a crime scene or the home of a suspect. And because, as we say, bits don’t go away, it can be even harder to eradicate digital fingerprints than it is to eradicate real ones.

Most likely the authorities were just checking the web browser history on Casey’s computer. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, look for a “History” menu on your browser; it’ll show ¬†where you’ve been to on the Web. The default setting on Safari, a browser I use on my Mac, is to save the history for a week, but I can make it longer. It’s a convenience; every now and then I want to go back to something I was looking at a few days ago, and by using the history I can find it quickly. When I search using Google, the history records not just that I was using Google, but what I was searching for. Bingo, if you’re a gumshoe and can get access to my machine. (There is an entirely separate issue of whether Google is keeping its own record of my searches and would turn it over to law enforcement. We talk about that in Blown to Bits also.)

Suppose Casey wanted to cover her tracks — what should she have done? Well, Safari has a “Clear History” command; that would be a good place to start. There’s also a “Reset Safari” menu item (try it — it will let you choose what to reset and give you the option of canceling or following through). Firefox calls this “Clear Private Data.”

But most people are PC and Internet Explorer users. I assumed Casey is too, and checked what Microsoft says about clearing the history of Explorer searches.

Have you seen those Mac ads where a geeky Bill Gates figure fumbles about the complexities of Vista, side by side with a cooler, more normal Mac user? (As a personal caricature, it’s actually unfair to Bill; when he was the age of the actor, he was wiry and energetic, like a coiled spring, not the doughy goofball the ad depicts. Of course, the ad doesn’t claim that’s supposed to be Bill. And in any case ads aren’t required to be fair about things like that.)

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about How to Clear the History Entries in Internet Explorer for version 6:

1.	Close all running instances of Internet Explorer and all browser windows.
2.	In Control Panel, click Internet Options.
3.	Click the General tab, and then click Clear History.
4.	Click Yes, and then click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box.

If the cached addresses are still listed in the Address box in Internet Explorer, use the following steps:

	1. Quit Internet Explorer.
	2. Delete all of the values except for the (Default) value from the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs

NOTE: Values in this registry key are listed as Url1, Url2, Url3, and so on. If you delete only some values and the remaining values are not in consecutive numerical order, only some of the remaining entries are listed in the Address box. To prevent this behavior from occurring, rename the remaining values so that they are in consecutive numerical order.

Even if Casey had tried to cover her tracks, she probably couldn’t have managed, if she was using the version of Explorer that is most widely in use. No wonder Microsoft is mounting its own funky advertising campaign, starring Jerry Seinfeld and the real Bill Gates, to humanize its products.

And no wonder Google sees an opportunity with its new Chrome browser, as we discussed recently. And indeed, no wonder, as David Pogue noted, Chrome has

something called Incognito mode, in which no cookies, passwords or cache files are saved, and the browser’s History list records no trace of your activity. (See also: Safari, Internet Explorer 8 [which is now available in Beta].) Google cheerfully suggests that you can use Incognito mode “to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” but they’re not fooling anyone; the bloggers call it “porn mode.”

That’s a useful feature for anyone planning a crime, too!

P.S. There is yet another issue. Even if the history isn’t visible through the menu commands, traces of it may well still be stored on disk in a way that a brute force search of disk blocks, one by one, would reveal. “Deleted” doesn’t actually mean that the bits have been destroyed utterly. In both the offense and defense of computer forensics, you can almost always do a better job if you spend more time and money, so how confidently one can say that bits are “gone forever” depends on the cash value you attach to destroying them or discovering them.