Yahoo says my password is too weak

A lot of visitors searching for data on a Yahoo ‘password too weak’ issue end up on my own Password is too weak… page.

My own issue was with BT – but since there is a close relationship between BT and Yahoo, it may well be exactly the same problem. The answer lies within the comments on my earlier page. Put simply, the BT password rules exclude certain characters that get generated by password managers (such as vertical bars), and is limited to 16 characters.

If you go over 16 characters and include vertical bars then you get a ‘password too weak’ error when actually your password is being rejected because it is too strong.

I don’t use Yahoo so cannot confirm whether this is the same issue. However, if Yahoo is continually rejecting your password as ‘too weak’ it would be worth checking the small print; and perhaps limiting your password to 16 characters – and no vertical bars.

Aethelred versus the Vikings – a neverending story

My peers may remember playing Saxons and Normans on the beach as small children (it was before black and white television and the rise of cowboys and indians and cops and robbers). The alternative was Saxons and Vikings; but suffered because apart from Harold we only knew two Saxons: Alfred and Aethelred. Aethelred was the short straw, because he was never ready – or more accurately, he was ill-advised and accepted bad or no counsel.

Vikings embarking on a denial of service attack – source Wikipedia

Well Aethelred and the Vikings are making a comeback. Aethelred is business and the Vikings are hackers; and it doesn’t seem to matter what good advice is given, Aethelred ignores it and the hackers come back – again, and to gain and again.

Good counsel: encrypt, but Aethelred does not. Use and enforce strong passwords, but he doesn’t. Undertake staff awareness training on a continuous basis, but he doesn’t bother. The list goes on and on.

But the absolute perfect proof that the spirit of Aethelred yet lives and breathes can be seen in a comment from Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network Security. He was talking about the DDoS attack on Battlefield 3, “yet another in a long line of attacks aimed at disrupting gamers.”

Sometimes such attacks come from the competition; other times its just for the lulz. But, he adds, “Another motive our clients in gaming and across other sectors continue to experience is cyber extortion. Malicious users specifically threaten gaming and other sites, demanding to be paid a ransom or be the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. More often than not these blackmail threats go unreported as some companies opt to pay the ransom rather than go public with the attack in the hope that this will satisfy the hackers, though this is rarely the case and may lead to the site continually being targeted.”

Aethelred, a long-standing Anglo-Saxon tradition that believes we can yet get peace in our time, lives on. Looks like the Vikings are winning again.

The law is an ass

It’s worth repeating. The law is an ass. 

A fundamental purpose of law is to protect the individual. Sadly, this purpose has long since been appropriated by big business – the purpose of the law is now to pander for business at the expense of the citizen through the collusion of politicians.

The result is that the law has become ridiculous.

In the past it used to be an unwritten rule in the UK that parliament would not pass unenforceable laws. The reason is that a law that cannot be enforced makes the law look an ass. Worse, it makes parliament look as big an ass as the law that cannot be enforced.

Here’s an example. Parliament has created the laws that made the courts attempt to block The Pirate Bay (TPB) at the behest of the music industry (and film and video and video gaming etcetera). Parliament has become the pimp of the music industry (ironic, really, since neither prostitution nor the employment of prostitutes is illegal – because it is unenforceable – but pimping is illegal).

But back to The Pirate Bay. The courts have been forced by the alliance of parliament and the music industry to order the ISPs to block TPB. But blocking TPB is so unenforceable it is absurd; confirming that the law and parliament has become a collective ass.

The easiest way to get round the block is to use a proxy service. You go to a site in a country that doesn’t operate a block, and that website redirects you to TPB. A quick search on Google turned up at least 150 TPB proxies.

But you don’t even need to look for them. There’s a Chrome add-on and an Android app that will do it for you automatically.

If you don’t use Chrome and don’t have Android you could use TOR, which will both provide anonymity and bypass the block. Or use a VPN. Both of these require some effort and a little knowledge.

So you could simply switch to the Opera browser and turn on Turbo mode. Turbo mode is designed for users with slow connections. It speeds things up by going via Opera’s own servers. But since you are going to Opera rather than TPB, you don’t get blocked when you go through Opera Turbo to get to TPB.

The Pirate Bay, via Turbo Opera, from the UK

This is TPB via Opera Turbo from the UK today. Note that although I asked for thepiratebay.se (Sweden), I automatically got redirected to TPB’s latest home at dotSX. TPB moved from Sweden to “Sint Maarten, a tiny island in the northeast Caribbean located 190 miles east of Puerto Rico,” a few days ago (TorrentFreak). This follows the latest court case in Sweden against TPB by the music industry. Incidentally, TPB also has an Icelandic domain. The music industry case in Sweden is trying to get the Icelandic domain closed because it is registered to a man of Swedish nationality. I salute Marius Olafsson of Iceland’s domain registry ISNIC, who told TorrentFreak: “ISNIC will legally fight attempts to use the domain name registry system to police/censor the net. We believe that to be ineffective, wrong and dangerous to the stability of the DNS as a whole.”

Or you could simply use the Google cache. Chrome direct:

The Pirate Bay direct – as blocked by UK ISPs

Google’s cache:

The Pirate Bay via Google cache from the UK

The long and the short of it is that the UK blockade of The Pirate Bay (or any other website) is unenforceable.

Only about 30% of the UK electorate bothered to vote in last Thursday’s local elections. Pompous political spinners try to tell us that it’s mid-term and people are more concerned with national rather than local issues. I give them an alternative – the people are totally disillusioned with politics and politicians and the whole political process because the law and parliament has become an ass in the pocket of big business.

And that’s a tragedy.