Do It: Read "Kill the Password"

A while back, my main email account was hacked. After some deliberation, I had given my new email address to a friend whose Internet hygiene is questionable and, sure enough, within 24 hours I was receiving notes from friends that I was spamming them.

My first reaction was panic. What if the hackers locked me out of my own account? What if they stole my credit card numbers? What if they posted my miserable self-recorded guitar playing on the Web?! My next reaction was to act immediately to change my password and read up on security. Then, sheepishly, I began to change my password everywhere I had an account. Why? Because I was using the same password every. place. I. went.

I know. Bad form. But I am more secure today. Thanks in large part to a recent article in Wired magazine, which, while painting a doomsday scenario for the future of online safety, does offer some very helpful security tips.

To wit, few of the author's "Dos": 

"Enable two-factor authentication when offered. When you log in from a strange location, a system like this will send you a text message with a code to confirm. Yes, that can be cracked, but it’s better than nothing. 

Give bogus answers to security questions. Think of them as a secondary password. Just keep your answers memorable. My first car? Why, it was a “Camper Van Beethoven Freaking Rules.” 

Scrub your online presence. One of the easiest ways to hack into an account is through your email and billing address information. Sites like Spokeo and WhitePages.com offer opt-out mechanisms to get your information removed from their databases. 

Use a unique, secure email address for password recoveries. If a hacker knows where your password reset goes, that’s a line of attack. So create a special account you never use for communications. And make sure to choose a username that isn’t tied to your name—like m****n@wired.com—so it can’t be easily guessed."

So, do it: read "Kill the Password." It's great.

PS - The last of the "do's" has been the real eye-opener for me. Oh, and it is completely safe to bend an ear to "Devastation" by The Besnard Lakes; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: The Hardy Boys

Friend, are you like me? Do you like action, mystery, and cliff-hanging suspense? Then you, too, will want to read The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories, Registered Trademark. Yes, youngster, you'll enjoy the thrilling adventures of America's favorite detective duo, Frank and Joe Hardy. Their keen insight, cheeky but never inappropriate disregard for adult supervision, and touching camaraderie with their swell friends help bring the criminal element to justice and will thrill you, making you eager to read more of their serial exploits, all in hard cover.

Indeed, if you can ignore the dated, casual ethnic stereotyping, leveled vocabulary, and the fact that there was no actual author named Franklin W. Dixon, you can--as I do--feel nostalgic about this classic casebook series. You can even re-read one as an adult, which I recently did.

The entrepreneurial offspring of Bayport's well-known detective Fenton Hardy, the Hardy Boys--always introduced as brown-haired and level-headed Frank and younger, blonde, impetuous Joe--were a staple growing up in my house. Their best pal Chet Morton always had a sweet tooth, a new hobby that proved remarkably helpful to the case at hand, and a vivacious sister, who provided a love interest for Joe. Their "favorite dates" Callie Shaw, a giggly blonde who sees Frank, and the aforementioned Iola Morton, a brunette who goes with Joe, added romantic interest, forming cleverly mismatched hair color couples.

The books were full of this sort of thing:

     "While Frank and Joe stared in utter amazement, the huge clock and the wall section behind it began sliding to one side.

     "'Why,' Frank gave an inward gasp, 'it's a door, hidden by the clock attached to it!'"

     -- While the Clock Ticked. Dixon, Franklin W. New York (NY): Grosset & Dunlap, 1962. Pp. 134-35.

I never confused it with literature, but I must admit to reading a ton of them as a kid and to collecting a few of the 66 titles for myself. Go back and read a story; it's fun, but you'll probably need only the one. And recommend matching wits with the Hardy Boys to an age-appropriate kid in your life.

PS - No need to buy all of them. You can just fire up the old jalopy and check them out from the Bayport Public Library. Oh, and "Sunrise" by Yeasayer is a thrilling adventure in an of itself; now playing on iTunes.

Caneel Bay

I recently went to the US Virgin Islands for a brief vacation. I was a Virgin Islands virgin, so I wanted my first trip to be special (and I wanted them to respect me afterward). I chose to go to Caneel Bay on St John. I chose right.

In a fit of noblesse oblige, Laurance Rockefeller--who was enraptured by the island--bought up much of St. John through an environmental protection intermediary, gave it to the US government to create the Virgin Islands National Park, and built a low-profile but sprawling hotel for the 1% on several of its many charming bays. As a result, your Caribbean vacation can consist of lolling around in a paradise well-stocked with sunshine, gorgeous water, charming flora and fauna, and hikes in the park rather than gambling, smoking, and sitting cheek to jowl with casual drunks in the swim-up bar at a chain high-rise hotel adjacent to a nominal "beach." Thank you, Laurence.

The Rockefellers are like that. Yes, they have sometimes been problematic misogynist monopolist prudes who crushed their competitors with Social Darwinist furor. But they protect land with vision and missionary zeal. And I like my overlords like that ... and I love that for $31/hour today someone like me can bask in the Caribbean's glory before global warming makes translucent seas and coral reefs a relic of the Holocene.

It is truly delightful.

PS - Go there immediately...or, uh, once the hurricane season ends (Caneel closes for September and October). You can thank me, and Laurance, later. Oh, and "Pelican" by The Maccabees is also delightful; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Game of Thrones

When he is not obsessing over medieval culinary delicacies and the finer points of battle dress, media sensation George RR Martin is busy crushing it story-telling-wise.

Hearing about the popularity of his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, I got a copy of the first book for my girlfriend. She promptly inhaled the five-part-to-date series and is impatiently awaiting the next installment. I decided to give it a shot since she liked it so much and have been amazed at the way Martin invents and fully inhabits his fictional land of Westeros, home to seven squabbling kingdoms. Nearly every one of the inter-bred ruling family members and their minions is interesting (chapters are serially told from the perspective of one character at a time), there is enough hot and cold running backstory to pay homage to Frank Herbert, and the author has conjured up a killer app for his series: The Wall.

The Wall is made of solid ice 700 feet high, 100 leagues long--that's 300 miles to those of us not living in the British Isles--and so thick that it houses tunnels and prisons and The Seven know what else inside it. The Wall is all that stands between the "civilized" residents of the South and a northern territory known as Beyond the Wall or, more chillingly, as "The Land of Always Winter."

Somewhat disappointingly, The Wall is not really an allegory about the small-mindedness of Rep. Duncan Hunter or the bizarreness of modern US/Mexico relations. It more than makes up for it, however, by being awesomely about keeping The Others out of the South. The Others are a terrifying race of gaunt ice beings whose eyes shine blue and who silently slaughter you and your pals as they remorselessly converge on you regardless of your defenses. Oh, and, after they kill you, your undead corpse--complete with colorless skin offset by black, blood-engorged hands--rises to kill anyone you knew before. Brr.

Take a gander; here, Sam, one of The Wall's guardians, summarizes what the history books in Westeros say about the shivvery beings beyond The Wall:

 "The Others come when it is cold, most of the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear. They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night ... or else night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part's plainly true. Some accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don't know what those are. Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls."

-- A Dance with Dragons. Martin, George R.R. New York (NY): Bantam Books, 2011. Pp. 179-180 (of 1705 in the e-version).

Martin seamlessly weaves together something the reader has seen--Small Paul's nightmarish death at the hands of a corpse-riding ice horror--with a totally believable "history" from the past of his fabricated world. Combined with an unerring ear for an authentic-sounding kind of Middle Ages lingo--"it makes no matter" and "plainly true"--the plot sucks you into a fully-conceived universe that you are happy to inhabit for thousands of pages.

PS -- I must admit that I skipped the fourth book, which has nearly universally been reviewed as a slog whose only real purpose it to set up book five. I am quite a slow reader so I WikiCheated instead and read the plot online, skipping from book three to the present. Oh, but "Northern White Clouds" by Supermule is no slog; now playing on iTunes.