A quick question:

How many people know your mothers maiden name/first pet’s name/frequent flyer number etc?

More than you’d think.

Every time you sign up for the latest website, service or  account you’re asked for details like this as a security procedure in case you forget your password. Often this information is all that stands between someone and complete access to all of your accounts.

Let’s look at an example:

1: You decide to try out the latest Twitter clone/social networking site/stupid Facebook application.

2: As part of the sign up process you are asked to provide your email (they promise they won’t share it with spammers) and the name of your first teacher (the ’security’ question).

3: You fill in the details and enjoy your new toy.

All seems fine so far right? Wrong! You may just have given away access your email account and probably a lot more besides. Say you’ve entered your email address as ‘jimbowejs@gmail.com’, and supplied your first teachers name as ‘Bob’, all an unscrupulous site owner needs to do is head over to gmail, claim to have lost the password for their account and fill in the details you’ve just given them. They now have access to your mail, and let’s not forget to any other sites that you’ve registered for with that email address.

What can be done to stop this?

Be careful with your security questions! When you can choose your own question it’s a good idea to do so. If you do use your own questions, consider not giving a question at all, but a clue to the password that only you would know (you can then give a random answer).

Try to know at least a little bit about who your giving details to before signing up for ANYTHING.

And, of course, use different passwords for different sites. You’re only making an attackers job easier if they can just use the exact same password you just signed up for their ’service’ with to login to your mail/banking/PayPal…

Reading through Maximum PC’s list of 50 skills every real geek should have I noticed ‘Downloading flash video’ from sites like YouTube was on the list. So, cunningly avoiding the many easy ways to do it, I decided to put together a quick shell script, after all it can’t be that hard, you just need to look at the HTTP headers…

Well it turns out YouTube don’t make it that easy, but after a bit of prodding I ended up with something that will at least save a YouTube video to an flv file:

This will probably only work till the YouTube site changes, so if it’s broken blame them and not my shoddy coding

Simple one-purpose site Ding It’s Up sends you an email (or text/twitter message) when a site you specify comes back online.

Pretty useful stuff, but not content to let something remain simple I decided to make a bookmarklet so that when I’m on a site that’s down, I can just hit the link in my bookmarks bar and get an email when it comes back.

To use this, either drag the link below, or right click and select “Bookmark this link”. You’ll then need to change the bookmark properties to replace ‘YOUREMAILADDRESS’ with your email address.

Let me know when it’s back

If you find this useful, you may also like the ‘Get archived version’ bookmark which checks for archived copies of the current page from archive.org:

Get archived version

Both of these have been tested to some extent in Firefox. Please leave a comment if you have any problems.