I wish that I could use a stronger password for this site. 8 characters are NOT enough.
Response (Gaurav Sharma) 02/06/2010 05:53 AM
Thank you for your email regarding your online password.
I would like to inform you that our website has a 128 bit encryption. With this base, passwords that comprise only of letters and alphabets create an algorithm that is difficult to crack. We discourage the use of special characters because hacking softwares can recognize them very easily.
The length of the password is limited to 8 characters to reduce keyboard contact. Some softwares can decipher a password based on the information of “most common keys pressed”.
Therefore, lesser keys punched in a given frame of time lessen the possibility of the password being cracked.
Moreover, American Express is committed to protecting the privacy and security of all of our Cardmembers, both on-line and off-line. We believe that our current security measures, which include our sophisticated monitoring systems to detect unusual or fraudulent card activity, provide strong, ongoing protections for our Cardmembers.
Rest assured, I have forwarded your comments to our webmaster for review. During this review, we may contact you if additional information is required.
We value your membership and wish goodness and health to you and your family.Sincerely,
Gaurav Sharma
Email Servicing Team
American Express Interactive Services
O_o
A school district in Riverside County has pulled the Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition dictionary from school shelves because it includes the term “oral sex.” The Menifee Union School District took the action last week after a parent complained about the dictionary.
Full Article (Los Angeles Times - latimes.com)
BlueBeat.com made waves this week in the music world by selling remastered Beatles tracks for a quarter a piece. Now, hit with a federal copyright lawsuit, the company behind the site has responded… and it says that BlueBeat actually owns the copyright on the works it sells. EMI is not amused.
A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.
Google has angered the Android enthusiast community by sending a cease and desist notice to a third-party developer who is building a popular custom version of the open source platform. Google doesn’t want its proprietary bits included in cooked ROMs.
Though machines with 4GB are not yet the typical purchase for home or business use, they are readily available from major manufacturers and it won’t be long before they are the typical purchase. But there are problems. You don’t have to stand for long in a computer shop to hear a sales assistant talk of 4GB as some sort of limit for 32-bit operating systems, and it won’t be long before this sales patter develops into outright promotion of 64-bit Windows as the only way to get past this limit.
Customers were left puzzled as to why Amazon would reach out and delete e-books from their Kindle readers, and the situation was made ironic given that the books were Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Ars reports why this happened, and how the future will be different.
A court has found newsgroup provider Usenet.com liable for copyright infringement. Advertising to file-sharers, putting “warez” in your site’s meta tags, and tampering with evidence don’t amuse federal judges.
A government audit (PDF) has pinpointed more than 3,800 vulnerabilities — 763 of which are high-risk — in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Web-based air traffic control system applications, including some that could potentially put air travel at risk.
We wrote a few days ago that following Microsoft’s decision to officially call its next operating system Windows 7, there were simply too many opportunities for a good headline. Well, now we get another chance thanks to Microsoft. In a post so ridiculous that I find it hard to believe it’s serious, Microsoft’s Mike Nash lays out how Microsoft got to the “7″ in Windows 7. The problem is really the beginning of paragraph three: “Anyway, the numbering we used is quite simple.”
Two whistleblowers have come forward to ABC News with allegations that the NSA routinely listened in on the phone calls of ordinary Americans, journalists, aid workers, and military personnel who were living in the Middle East and calling friends and loved ones back in the US. Both of these whistleblowers were employed by the NSA as intercept operators at a facility in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where they were tasked with intercepting, recording, and monitoring satellite phone calls into and out of Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Less than a week after RealNetworks launched its new DVD ripping and archiving product, RealDVD, a court has ordered the company to temporarily suspend its distribution. A visit to the RealDVD web site reveals a message from Real, stating that the product is unavailable. “Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable,” reads the site. “Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.”
At long last, John McCain and Barack Obama can pantomime lightsaber duels or get their Numa Numa on like any other red-blooded American. In a move that a spokesperson for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called “a major step into the future,” the Senate Rules and Administration Committee has deigned to permit links to third-party sites like YouTube and Flickr from Senators’ official pages.
Ars book reviews typically focus on works for the general public that we consider significant and insightful. But today we’re making an exception: the work in question is meant for school children, and it’s an atrociously bad book. So why review it? Because, unfortunately, it may well turn out to be very significant. The leading lights of the Intelligent Design Movement, the Discovery Institute, have written this textbook on evolution, and they are doing everything they can to make sure it gets into schools.
If you’re a Nike+iPod Sport Kit fan, you may eventually find yourself being restricted to using it with Nike-branded sportswear, thanks to a recently-published Apple patent application. The patent, filed for in March of 2007 and published last week, describes a “Smart Garment” that would allow a gadget to authenticate to a specific garment—whether that garment is shoes, pants, or a jacket. When the garment is authenticated, however, unapproved garments would be blocked from being able to use the device.
