Don't forget to thank a veteran.

Note: No I'm not criticizing the US military, or veterans. I'm a veteran. My point is that military forces do not provide "freedom", that must come from internal political and judicial processes, which must in turn arise from the desires and actions of the citizenry at large. Military forces just make it possible for us to do whatever we're going to do free of external coercion. What we choose to do, though, can go either way.

Sorry for the semi-OT post. It just struck a chord, in light of the recent holiday and the flurry of "thank a veteran" messages it always spawns.

But... 30-somethings are young'uns.

And the more likely it is that you'll have a wealth of background to draw on when coming up with obscure-but-memorable (to you) bits of information you can combine and tweak to make a good password. I definitely notice this when comparing passwords my wife chooses with passwords my kids choose. She uses bits of old but important dates, parts of names of people she knew decades ago, etc. and comes up with some pretty good ones. I can mostly recognize where she got the pieces but doubt I'd ever be able to guess her password if she didn't tell it to me.

My kids, on the other hand, tend to pick simple names of favorite entertainment characters. Even when I try to get them to pick something more complex, they just don't seem to have much else to draw on. When I pointed out not long ago that one son's choice of his favorite pokemon's name as a password wasn't very hard to guess, he proceeded to pick a another pokemon with a longer name. When I talked him through the idea of picking several and using pieces of their names, the result was still not very good.

Perhaps all of this is just a result of not caring as much, but I think there's more to it.

(BTW, some are undoubtedly wondering why I force my family to give me their passwords. I don't. In fact I harp at them all regularly about how they shouldn't ever tell me their password. They roll their eyes and just blurt it out when I ask them to type it so that I can fix something on their account. I also find out their password when they forget their old password and I have to reset it for them. I used to change it to "changeme", but then I found out that just meant that my kids, at least, always had "changeme" as their password. So they actually have better security if I make them come up with something and tell it to me so I can set it. It also gives me a chance to make them think about whether or not they can remember the new password so I don't end up having to reset it again tomorrow.)

Er, s/wouldn't/would/

Very true.

My brother-in-law has an equally... er... effective strategy. He set his SSID to "broken" in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it. He also has WPA2 with a reasonable password, though.

If your SSID is non-broadcast, and your laptop is set to automatically connect to it, your laptop does that by continually broadcasting your SSID whenever it's not connected. So you're actually broadcasting your SSID to more people and places than if you set your router to broadcast it. Luckily, the SSID really has no security value.

You do know that IP != DNS, and that most of those parked domains don't consume an IP address, right?

But mapping http://google/ to their search engine would make a lot of sense.

I'm guessing from your spelling choices that you're in the UK?

Based on your comment and various others, it appears to me that Google Maps data in the US is very good, which has led to relatively little interest in OSM, which has led to OSM data not being so great. In some other industrialized countries the reverse has been true. Since Google isn't very good, there's greater interest in OSM, which leads to OSM data being very good.

Does that agree with your experience?

Actually, Google does generate a lot of its own map data. Google buys whatever data they can, but in many areas have paid to create it themselves where the available data wasn't of sufficiently high quality. For city areas, where Google wants to provide complete coverage of 3D building models, Google bought Sketchup and then incented people to create models in various ways, including just paying them. Now Google is shifting to automated means of generating 3D models from other data (I'm not sure how much I can say here, so I'm being vague) and so has sold Sketchup to Trimble. I wouldn't be surprised if the same automated techniques are increasingly used to generate more 2D data as well.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, in fact in the same office as the Sketchup guys were. I've sat in on tech talks given by some of the people working on map data, and the above constitutes the information I'm sure I can share without violating confidentiality. I suspect that much of what I'm holding back is public knowledge, but I have to err on the side of caution.)