Hacker's Jargon

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yogi
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Joined: 14 Feb 2015, 21:49

Hacker's Jargon

Post by yogi »

At the rate databases are being hacked we common folks get to see a lot of editorials and news reports filled with words that only geeks would dare try to understand. It won't increase the effectiveness of your password to know all the terms used to by computers to secure them, but it could be interesting so see what is being done. The following article is pretty straight forward and easy to understand. Read all about it if you are interested in what could happen to your password in order to make it secure.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ting-sha-2
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Kellemora
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Re: Hacker's Jargon

Post by Kellemora »

Very Interesting Yogi! I read the whole thing, especially the last line that says IF the website stores your passwords as plain text, the length of a password means nothing, hi hi... I doubt any websites do this though.
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yogi
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Re: Hacker's Jargon

Post by yogi »

Passwords used to be stored in plain text on servers and passed to them from the client over the POST method of the http protocol. You don't even have to be a hacker to figure that one out. I was surprise to learn a few years ago that at least one popular web site (MySpace, I think) still saved things in plain text. Well, they got hacked and things are different now.

I don't know about hacking being a vote of confidence for Linux popularity. Most, if not all, the vulnerabilities are targeted at servers. These days it's just so easy now to get the tools and buy the hardware to do some serious penetration.

I also don't know all that you do there, but you say you have a need for Flash. I'm guessing at least some of the games played use the gstreamer function for the audio, and that is exactly where this vulnerability was discovered.
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Kellemora
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Re: Hacker's Jargon

Post by Kellemora »

I use Mopidity and VLC, both are sandboxed, instead of GStreamer, which cannot be sandboxed.
The one game I do play I have the sound turned off, but the sound only plays in internal song file that was loaded when the game was installed. A few times I used a different song files, by renaming them to the name of the games song filename and that played instead. It's set back now to the way it was installed, but as I said, I keep the sound off.

The computer I do my accounting on is not connected to the Internet, nor does it have a working LAN card in it. If I need to move files from it, I have to do so using a USB stick.
Although I love Gnome, the particular desktop I'm running is not Gnome compatible. Learned that the hard way too!

I have not used Ubuntu or Mint in a few years. Although both are built on Debian, things written for them will not necessarily work on Debian. In fact, the Install Program for my new printer is Exact Version specific. Although the printer installed without a hitch on most of my computers, I had a lot of trouble on this computer, the installer would not work. I didn't realize I had upgraded this computer from Debian 8.5 to Debian 8.6. I had to wait for HPLIP to provide an installer for Debian 8.6 before I could get the printer connected properly on this computer. I could force install the driver package, but it did not include the other features for the printer.
By my way of thinking, it is the security features of each version that prevents installers for one version from working on another version. This is one of the reason it is so hard to find hardware for Debian, even hardware that says it works on Linux and they provide an install file, they don't work on Debian, only on Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. However, you can install the PPD file for the printer and bypass the installer program, but then you only have basic print functions.

As far as Passwords go, I have a different password for every site I visit. Some long, some short, but all using the same basic string with only a minor modification to each. I've even started using symbols in them as I change them. Many sites now require a symbol, so I figured I might as well get used to it, hi hi...
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