Protecting your computer and personal files should be considered very important. But according to PC magazine the following ten passwords are used extensively worldwide (mainly for access to the PC on log in).

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)

“If you recognize yours, you may as well hand over your wallet or purse to the first person you see on the street.”

According to a recent study in northern Europe, 36% said they didn’t use a password (Windows) or never changed it. So if the computer gets stolen all the files would be accessible instantly.

Being paranoid I tend to set both a BIOS password and a Win password (not equal off course). This way my private files would remain private should someone steal my precious ones

Do you have some more tips or questions – please fire away!

Came across “The Best Page In The Universe” yesterday and a hilarious post comparing the new iPhone with a Nokia E70. The author concludes “The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face“.

The language may be unsuitable to children below 13 but the point of the story is actually quite good. The whole site is actually quite good (hence the somewhat self-righteous title I suppose ) though it requires a minimum IQ of 20 (sorry Bush)…

The latest build in the FF 2 series was released yesterday. According to the release notes this release fixes several critical vulnerabilities besides the more obvious bug fixes.

Critical

• MFSA 2007-23 Remote code execution by launching Firefox from Internet Explorer
• MFSA 2007-21 Privilege escallation using an event handler attached to an element not in the document
• MFSA 2007-18 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption

A few days ago The PHP group announced they will discontinue PHP4 development. After New Year there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. They’ll continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis though, until August 2008.

The PHP group also urges everyone to use the rest of this year to make their applications suitable to run on PHP 5. And with PHP6 just around the corner this might not be a minute to late…

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, you could use the official PHP migration guide, or you could follow my tutorial on how to install PHP5 on Windows.

In case you are running a fresh install you might also be interested in some of my other installation tutorials about Apache2 (web server) and MySQL5 (database).

WLAN routers are not known to impress through its innovative design, however the new N1 from Belkin certainly stands out from the crowd.

Wednesday last week Belkin announced their forthcoming N1 model with a somewhat new concept and the highest WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) ever.

In addition to great design it’s equipped with an advanced interactive network display that allows you to view the activity of your network.

Besides a sleek Download/Upload Speedometer this provides info about network bandwidth usage, number of connected devices, guest access network key and the date and time.