Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Today’s is Delaware Liberal‘s War on Christmas party! It starts at 7 PM at Timothy’s on the Waterfront. Bring your canned goods for donation to the Food Bank.
Fox News tries some minority outreach.
Spanish actress Penélope Cruz recently revealed that she’s planning on giving birth to her baby boy in Los Angeles. Shortly after Fox News Latino called her unborn child an “anchor baby” in a story titled “Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem Are Having an Anchor Baby.
Great job Fox! Keep up the good work. Do you think their dozen Latino viewers are still watching?
Last week a group of hackers announced that they had broken usernames and passwords for the Gawker websites. So everyone who had an account on these websites had their password exposed. The Wall Street Journal did an analysis of these passwords and found that people aren’t that creative.
How do Gawker Media users express themselves when no one is watching? While many of their passwords are common phrases like “qwerty,” others appear distinctive to the Gawker community. Where else would “f—you,” “blahblah” and “whatever” rank among the most popular passwords? And why, oh why, is “monkey” in the top 10?
At least two popular passwords are science-fiction references: “trustno1″ was Special Agent Mulder’s password on “The X-Files,” and “thx1138″ is a George Lucas film that envisioned a dystopian future. (There’s no way to tell, but these were likely created by users of Kotaku io9, Gawker Media’s popular gaming sci-fi site.) Other popular passwords are just plain-old geeky: “dragon,” “superman,” “princess,” “starwars” and “nintendo.” W00t!
The set of Gawker Media passwords differs significantly from a cache of 10,000 Hotmail passwords that leaked online last year, though “123456″ was the most popular among both groups. In both cases, the datasets only include passwords that could be decoded and aren’t necessarily representive of all users. For instance, more complex passwords may be harder to decode. We eliminated all identifiable information from the data we studied.
I recommend not using “password” or “123456” as a password. You’re welcome for the geek tip (no charge this time).