Bill • November 16, 2021 8:34 AM

The NIST has already advised on passwords, and issued guidelines a couple of years ago — recommending LESS COMPLEX passwords (no rules) in favor of longer passwords.
They cite research indicating that complex passwords are not harder to crack, and are much harder to remember (which is why people write them down, or now use password managers). Longer passwords, on the other hand, can be easy to remember as phrases or strings of words, etc. Longer passwords are harder to crack. //

William Entriken • November 16, 2021 9:27 AM

NIST has published guidelines on what types of passwords should be accepted for login systems. We should promote and share solutions to the problem.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

Specifically the relevant recommendation here is: Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. //

Usability has a huge impact on how people interact with systems. If you purposely make the experiance different from site to site – users will take shortcuts including making weaker passwords. A common “password standard” would benefit everyone greatly and reduce risk over all.

"The gap was here," he says, holding his hands up between the frames. "The next ambassador was 2002 after the removal of the Taliban from power."

The gap is just a few inches of beige wall, but it represents 20 years of chaos, civil war and brutal totalitarian control. During those 20 years, this building was closed and shuttered. State Department officials say the U.S. holds embassies in trust until new governments are recognized. Not too far from here, the Iranian embassy has been frozen in such a state for more than 40 years now. //

Nejrabi says he and the other diplomats will stay as long as they possibly can. Then they will turn out the lights and hope it won't be another 20 years before someone turns them back on.

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But now, many doctors, their medical associations and members of Congress are crying foul, arguing the rule released by the Biden administration in September for implementing the law favors insurers and doesn't follow the spirit of the legislation.

"The Administration's recently proposed regulation to begin implementing the law does not uphold Congressional intent and could incentivize insurance companies to set artificially low payment rates, which would narrow provider networks and potentially force small practices to close, thus limiting patients' access to care," Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., who is a doctor and helped spearhead a letter of complaint this month, told us in a written statement. //

Nearly half of the 152 lawmakers who signed that letter were Democrats, and many of the physicians serving in the House signed. //

The provisions in the new rule "do not reflect the way the law was written, do not reflect a policy that could have passed Congress, and do not create a balanced process to settle payment disputes," the lawmakers told administration officials in the letter.

The humble favicon was messily birthed with the pernicious IE5 release. Since that fateful day, browsers have slowly expanded favicon technology to encompass many wildly differing and lightly documented use cases. Here in 2021 favicons are found primarily in browser tabs, home screens, and Google search results, but they continue to pop up in the strangest places.

Recently my team was tasked with building a favicon fetcher. As a warmup, I looked to see how Chrome handles favicon loading. Do you know that the favicon loader in Chrome is many thousands of lines of code? Why is it so complicated?

We realized we knew very little about the favicon ecosystem. Eventually we decided to fetch the Tranco top 100,000 websites and analyze their favicons. We checked each home page for favicons, Apple touch icons, and manifest icons. We also examined fallback locations like /favicon.ico. Here’s a quick table to catch you up: //

The big winner is the mesmerizing favicon from eventhorizontelescope.org, clocking in at a hefty 7MB. When I downloaded this favicon, the density of my machine increased and nearly collapsed into a black hole.

In the end, Cisneros learned that the offensive language couldn't be removed. That is often the case in other cities if officials there believe that it's wrong to erase a covenant from the public record. Instead, the county agreed to attach a piece of paper to Cisneros' covenant disavowing the language. //

After her ordeal, Cisneros started Just Deeds, a coalition of attorneys and others who work together to help homeowners file the paperwork to rid the discriminatory language from their property records. //

The bill allows property owners and homeowners associations to remove the offensive and unlawful language from covenants for no more than $10 through their recorder of deeds office and in 30 days or less, Johnson said. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, signed the bill into law in July. It takes effect in January 2022. //

Illinois becomes the latest state to enact a law to remove or amend racially restrictive covenants from property records. Maryland passed a law in 2020 that allows property owners to go to court and have the covenants removed for free. And in September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a bill that streamlines the process to remove the language. Several other states, including Connecticut and Virginia, have similar laws. //

"History can be ugly, and we've got to look at the ugliness," said Richter, who is white. "We can't just say, 'Oh, that's horrible.' I feel like it [covenants] should be in a museum, maybe, or in schoolbooks, but not still a legal thing attached to this land."