To Mars! Yes, Russia and China have decided to send a few spacecraft to Mars and one of its moons, Phobos. It’s the first step for them to get people to Mars. More and more I doubt we (USA) will get there first with setbacks like our shuttles and cutbacks like Bush has made.

In 2003 Russia declared plans to build a nuclear power station on Mars, you know, to give power to all the Russians that will be living there in 2030. I want to get a nice crater front property when they start selling, so I guess it’s a good thing I’m in Russia now!

Depending on your news sources, you may or may not have seen the following table describing how easy it is to crack your password using the ‘brute force’ method. (guessing with completely random strings of letters)

And you thought your passwords were safe at the minimum 6 characters because you added a 1 at the end.

This article covers how a hacker would get at your bank accounts and other important websites. The top three suggestions from the article:

• Don’t underestimate your e-mail password! Most ‘password reset’ buttons require only your e-mail address
• Don’t use the same password for everything
• Use UpperCase, lowercase and numb3rs.

My suggestion:

• The longer, the better (the longest you can memorize).
  According to Moore’s Law: the power of a computer doubles ever 1.5 years. This shortens the password guessing time, so you better have a really long password.

If you’d like to check your current password or try out new ones, visit Microsoft’s password checker.

[-via One Man's Blog]

I know lots of my friends are graduating from college this year and are now frantically looking for something to do.  I’d like to remind you all of a great way to make some money this summer.  Here is a hint: Did you know that Google is one of the best companies to work for in the world?  Their corporate saying is ‘Do no evil’ (unlike some companies).  While they are supposed to do good and great things, an axis of corporatevil (7 major companies) have recently allied against Google and YouTube.

Not scared in the least, this summer Google is hosting its 3rd Summer of Code.  Over 100 companies are offering summer jobs working in high tech fields all over the country.  Your work will land you $4,500 and a primo reference/resume boost.  If I were coming back to the US, I’d be all over this job opportunity!

Get your applications in now, closing day is March 26th!

in more recent news, Valleywag is reporting that all is not well inside of Google, with new second-class employees.  This might cost Google their best company status.

Radio Frequency ID is the wave of the future! And by future I mean now! That’s right! Very soon, every passport issued by the US government will have a RFID chip with biometric and personal information on it. This is a terrible idea, but unfortunately a necessary one if we ever want to live in a cool future world like Minority Report or Demolition Man.

Passport RFID chips are incredibly small, contain personal information and can be read by a simple RFID chip reader. These readers are about as complicated as radios and are easily obtained by determined people. While our government touts the security of these new data chips, hackers have already cloned them, and copied information off of them. Real safe.

Another, more useful project for RFID would be to chip and help locate papers in a business setting. A company has thought up a novel way to find papers in offices loaded to the brim with stacks of documents in piles everywhere. the RFID staple! Yes, a chip that carries the information about the document, when it was printed and by whom. Great idea, but I propose taking it one step further. Chip the paper! I’m not sure if I’m the first, since I found several patents on RFID paper, but most are ambiguous.

Just to get you a little more paranoid, Hitachi has come up with RFID ‘powder.’ RFID chips that are .05 square millimeters! Smaller than salt and pepper, thiner than a human hair and full of your personal information! Here is a picture to give you the scale.

that line is a human hair!

What are some good uses for RFID tags you have heard of?

Have you heard of 4581 Asclepius? How about 1566 Icarus? Probably not. Not like knowing their names could help you anyway. They are giant rocks in orbit around the earth. Each one is at least 1/2 a mile across and could cause the mass extinction of all life on the planet if they happened to give the Earth a kiss. We probably get a near miss from one of these Near Earth Objects once every 2-3 years.

So far we’ve found well over 4,000 rocks in orbit that could annihilate all life. Finding them is step one. We know there have been several asteroid impacts in history and there will be several more. We have found one rock that will hit us in about 800 years. Plenty of time to develop a defense plan before 1950 DA will have a 1/300 chance of killing us all.

If you watch the science news you’ve probably seen the name 99942 Apophis. It was going to hit the Earth. But then it wasn’t. They found it 3 days after it could’ve destroyed life the first time. Scientists (yes, all of them) have decided that Apophis will never collide with the Earth but that could be revised any number of times. Now people are looking at ways to divert asteroids. I’m personally in favor of a kinentic impact strategy. What is your favorite method?

The world could end tomorrow and we are helpless to stop it. All the more reason to live everyday like it’s your last, or at least stock up your bomb shelter for the apocalypse!

The profession of Webmaster is dying. Everyday people now make websites and blogs with the help of websites like godaddy.com. Sure it costs money, but for most of us 10 dollars a year is negligible. I own several domain names, and as of today one more. I’m now in the habit of buying domains when I get a good idea as a way to financially motivate me to follow through with them.  Having a website also reminds me of my ideas. Besides, designing websites is my hobby.

My first website was hosted on brunslo.com my freshman year of high school. If you know how to use the wayback machine, you can find out what my first l33t coding skills were like. If something actually impresses you, its probably because I stole most of the code from elsewhere on the net. But who doesn’t do that now? (Creative Commons licensed of course!)

I wanted a website of my own, so I bought MastermindEnterprises.com. Now, it’s defunct because I have yet to start up my own business. Although when I do, I’m all set with a domain name, trademark and slogan. This kept me satiated for years, but my itch to have more websites to design got too strong and I bought MastermindIndustries.com. I’m not sure why, but its only use was to save information about a DnD game I played in college.

Now I had a theme, and shortly thereafter I got another reason to make a website. Worldsim.org was home to a diceless role playing game that simulated Earth and a thousand variants thereof. It was a place for me to get my players to check out information and appreciate my webskillz.

Skip foward a few years and you get omnifriend.net. A team effort by myself and the owner of 3dgo.net to make an RSS reader for all formats of personal weblog (LJ, Blogger, etc), with comments. Its dead/down now, but was a great exercise in open source development. Our project can be found on sourceforge under the name OmniFriend.

This month I’ll be giving a presentation on gaming life in the USA. I’m a gamer, and naturally gravitate towards chances to bring more people into the fold and show them how awesome and varied games are. So as part of my preparation I created ultra simple character sheets for the attendees. Some of whom only know survival English. Molly noted that my sheets looked like ‘gateway’ version of the game. Someone who plays this will probably go on to more ’serious’ D&D gaming. Enter gatewaygames.net There’s nothing there yet so I’m not linking you there, but when I do I’ll be sure to let you know.

Long live the webmaster!

BTW, I do host websites for a very small fee. I’ll setup your hosting, get you a domain name, and setup a website/blog. If you are looking for a way to get a small internet presence and don’t like the big faceless companies, I can do business anywhere in the world. Please get in touch.

The Tesla coil is one of the coolest Sci-Fi come real inventions of all history. Free flowing, beautiful, human-bug zapping, electricity. Some guy in Australia built himself a Tesla coil on a rotating pole. He then put the coil on a car and calls it an anti-theft system. Check out the thumbnails for a better view.

Tesla Down Under [via -Gizmodo]