These pieces always drive me a little nuts.  Everyone’s home would be an easy target if someone spent time learning their routine.  In this example, the thief knew the family was at a Little League game so it was obvious he would have free reign of the home for an hour or so.

This was the part of the article the woman I met today was worried about.

Let’s start with your car. If your GPS has a key lock, use it. If it doesn’t, don’t list your home as “home.” Instead, call your address “ice cream store” or “supermarket.” That way, a thief can’t find out where you live.

Dear ABC, I really doubt car thieves make it a priority to rob the same person twice.  Additionally, it’s not difficult to find the home address in a vehicle.  The last time I checked your home address is on a few items on your car including the registration and possibly your insurance card.   If a thief was really stupid enough to intentionally rob the same person twice, its the work of a minute to open the glove box and put the address into your GPS.

For anyone reading this who might not have their address in their car.  Please don’t think your safe renaming your home address “Ice Cream Store”   Security by obscurity is a poor form of security in any guise.

I understand that making your tutorials easy to follow is important.  Still, could we all at least make an effort to recommend that instead of running chmod 0777, that the user change the ownership to the appropriate user or group?

Oh and in the case of the above tutorial, the appropriate command should have been:
sudo chown www-data
Then, only root and the webserver have write access to the directory.  Much better than allowing everyone full access.

This bookmarket allows you to generate random passwords using a word or phrase.  Basically what you do is you choose a Master Password.  Now when you visit a site you want to log into, you input your Master Password into the password field and click on the bookmarklet and it generates a random password.  Now the great thing about this is that it allows you to use the same Master Password for all websites, but when it generates the random password it uses the domain you are at.  In my blog’s case it would use connermccall.com as part of the password creation process. Using a random test phrase as my master password, this bookmarklet generated this password ‘zTew5ZoSsfjU’.

This means that you only need to remember your master password, but you can use original and secure passwords at all of your sites, and since it’s a bookmarket, as long as you have access to your browser or the web, you can always recreate your passwords.  This is a great way to increase your safety and security on the Internet, without causing much inconvienence, which really should be the point of all security software.