Education ... on road safety ...

I read the New Sunday Times today, and it is very sad to hear about

"M. Sanjev Raj was in the arms of M. Mariayee, 49, who was in the passenger seat of the Toyota Vios when the 11.30pm accident occurred.

They died on the way to hospital.

They were believed to have been seriously injured after hitting the dashboard. Mariayee was then flung out of the car while Sanjev fell to the floor in front of the seat." New Sunday Times, February 17, 2008.

I am sad at the lost of lives but I am actually very angry at the fact that these are well to do Malaysian citizens who are able to afford a Toyota Vios and yet they drive on the highway with the kid in the front seat together with the grandmother who is probably also not belted in (since she was "flung out of the car"). I see this a lot on our roads and being Malaysian, we take sympathy at the family when this happen ... but being an ANGRY person, I would want the law enforcement to charge the father (presumably the driver) with intention to murder.

... sad ... sad ... sad ... ANGRY ... ANGRY ... ANGRY

The Internet Penetration ...

As I was browsing the papers today, my normal Sunday morning habit, a classified advertisement on rooms to let caught my eye. It say "wifi available". To me this is interesting as it is now considered a differentiation point and soon, the availability of wifi (presumably Internet access as well) will be as common as saying the room has a door. Maybe, the term full furnished in future will also mean that it includes Internet access.

New Saga on the road!

Last night was the first time I saw the new Proton Saga on the road, well ... technically speaking, in the car park at The Curve in Damansara. It looks ..... ordinary .....

More on Brute Force Password Cracking

On my last post, I mentioned that I was able to crack a password within an hour since the password used is only 5 characters long. I forgot to mention that it was done on a low end Celeron PC. Immediately after that I started on another file of which I misplaced the password and it took me 14 hours to unveil the 6 character long password. I then began to search the Internet for more information and realized that there's this company by the name of rixler that can crack a Word or Excel document password within 10 seconds or thereabouts.

Being curious, it set me thinking. A powerful server with a good algorithm instead of brute force sure can generate income. So, since brute force attack on password is similar to just a basic search, then this method is super-parallel. In other words, by parallelizing the program, the performance improvement should exceed the number of processors. So a basic dual Quad core CPU server would probably still be able to on average crack the password in less than an hour for a 6 character password.

Brute Force Attack on MS Word Password Protection

It seems that a brute force attack to uncover Word document's password doesn't take very long on a standard PC these days. I was able to uncover a password protected Word document within 1 hour on a low-end Celeron D running at 2.4GHz. The document's password had 5 characters, that's it!

So, my advise is for those who wants to make life more difficult for others, opt for passwords that are at least 8 characters long and preferably it doesn't start with a number ;)