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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Young People News

12 August 2014

Researchers at Microsoft and Ottawa's Carleton University set out to to take a cold hard look at passwords and here's what they found: the way we traditionally measure password strength is inconsistent—and often say nothing about how hard it might be to guess a password.

Here's an example: some systems force you to chose an eight-character password, using capital letters, numbers and at least one number. That sounds pretty secure, but it's not. The word P@ssw0rd fits these criteria and password cracking tools such as JohntheRipper or hashcat will guess it in minutes. That's because they use something called "mangling rules" which take dictionary words and substitute letters such as a for @ or s for $.

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31 July 2014

 A schoolgirl has received a police caution after texting an explicit photograph of herself to her boyfriend, it has emerged.

The teenager sent the image via her phone, but after the couple had a row, he forwarded it to his friends.

Police were called in because she was under the age of 18 and therefore both were committing an offence of distributing an indecent image of a child.

 

Read the article here.

23 May 2014

Facebook announced a new feature for its Facebook app that can automatically identify music and TV shows playing in the background as you're writing a status update. When you activate it, the opt-in feature uses your smartphone's microphone to scan your surroundings; you'll see a sound icon moving on the screen as it does. If the Shazam-like feature finds a match, you can share songs or shows with your friends as part of your update.

Read more here

23 May 2014

The announcement from Facebook about two new features aimed at helping users to control their privacy is to be welcomed. Facebook's privacy controls have always provided the user with flexibility as to who information is shared with, but the new features will help people make a more informed choice.

Read more here

22 January 2014

The Kickstarter-funded Pocket Drone is a foldable, flying "multicopter" that its creators dubbed "the GoPro of drones." It's equipped with an action camera for capturing aerial photos and video and a rechargeable battery allowing for flights of up to 20 minutes. Plus, the device folds up to the size of a small tablet for portability. Read more.

What are the social implications of anybody being able to recor images almost anywhere, at anytime, the choose?