Careful what you post online, be very careful.

Steven J. Murdoch , a security researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory recently had his WordPress blog hacked. The hacker created an administrator account on the blog. However Steven quickly deleted it. He then began investigating how this happened. In the process of doing this he was curious about the password that the hacker used.

WordPress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database. It is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input
of MD5 hash from an output. Someone would have to try out all
possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.

Steven looked at various lengthy methods of uncovering the password, but in the end he turned to Google. It seems that many sites use hashing for query strings. His search led him to a genealogy page with the surname of Anthony. Bingo, this was indeed the password.

More detail can be found in his original posting about Google as a password cracker.

Computer companies are on notice after the world's largest hard
drive manufacturer, Seagate, reached an out of court settlement, after
claims it had misled consumers regarding storage capacity.

The
class action, filed in a California court, claimed Seagate wrongly
defined one kilobyte as one thousand bytes, not 1,024 bytes, which is
regarded as the industry standard.

This results in a hard drive labelled as 1GB, actually being 73,741,824 bytes, almost 70MB, short of the mark.

theage.com.au 31/10/2007