Web site passwords and you

September 21, 2008 @ 17:21

Since many of my friends have been talking about ping.fm in positive words, I decided to sign up for an account earlier today. The signup process was smooth, but the actual setup wasn’t - I might be naive, but I didn’t expect them to ask me for my passwords for all those other services I wanted to ping. I’d rather not give out any password, an opinion I share with e.g. Jeff Atwood. While considering if I should make an exception in this case, I decided to change passwords for a few web services I use from time to time.

Now, changing a password really shouldn’t be a complex thing to do, but many sites still do their best to make this simple task a real p**n in the ass. Some might give incomplete restrictions (“You may use this and that”, where this and that turns out to be an incomplete set of rules when you try to update the password) while others prevent you from choosing a secure password at all (“You may only use the letters a-z, max eight (8) characters”). Below are two of my favorites from today’s futile attempt to change passwords…

Germanwings: “8 characters, 2 digits, no special chars!”

Ok. That won’t make a very secure password. And as a special bonus; non-ascii characters are not allowed in any field in the form on the account page. This is tricky since my street address contains the letter å. And when you thought it couldn’t get worse… it turns out that you cannot log out from the site (well, you could by restarting the browser but that really isn’t gonna happen).

Telenor Mina sidor (translated from Swedish into English): “Your new password may only contain the following characters; A-z, a-z and 0-9.”

OK… that sucks, but I guess I can always replace some of the characters in the new password. Attempting to submit again, with fixes that passes the failed attempt one.

“Your new password contains too many characters! The maximum number allowed is 15”.
Argh… Why couldn’t you just say this from the beginning?

But there’s hope! LinkedIn gets things right and presents me with the following caption above the password field; “Passwords are case-sensitive and must be at least 6 characters. A good password should contain a mix of capital and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols”. That wasn’t that hard, was it? Now go learn from LinkedIn, all you other FAIL services.

Leopard: Checking for running services

July 14, 2008 @ 12:09

If you ever need to check for which ports your computer listens to, fire up a terminal and…

netstat -na | grep -i listen

For each service that isn’t just local, look at the port number and match it against Wikipedia’s list of ports for various services. If some port isn’t listed there, lsof can be your rescue:

lsof | grep PORT
Rasmus pointed out that you can do this the right™ way as well:
lsof -i :PORT

Good luck hunting those services!