terriko

Here's the 140-chars-or-less version of a link to my latest post at Geek Feminism

Barbie Becomes a Computer Engineer: http://ur1.ca/m6lo It is interminably weird to imagine Barbie as a potential coworker!

Another post to Web Insecurity. This one is pretty much explained by the title:

Amex thinks shorter passwords without special characters are more secure

I was working on a background section of my thesis proposal and was talking about how some misconceptions regarding security policies can result in web sites being a lot less secure. But [American Express] takes security misconceptions to a new low...

(Read the rest. And weep. Or laugh. It's pretty terrible.)

I've rearranged my data feeds so I get more security news, and I'm finding I want to write a little bit about it, so I've resurrected WebInsecurity.net for the purpose of talking about recent security news. It's actually a nice warm-up exercise when I find myself having writer's block while I work on my thesis proposal. That's actually what I was hoping for when I started WebInsecurity.net, but then I found a lot of what I wanted to write should probably be in the proposal and it wasn't working so well as a change of pace. So time to reboot and try something easier to keep myself in good writing form.

So there will be new stuff at WebInsecurity.net and if you're so inclined, here's the webinsecurity.net rss feed or you can go use the fancy-schmancy subscribe buttons on the site itself. Edit: Oh, and there's webinsecurity_feed for the dreamwidth folk! (Have I mentioned how much I love dreamwidth lately?)

As most of these are just plain interesting, I'll probably post short summaries here too. So here's today's!

Web Insecurity: Credit card companies covering their ass(ets)
Exactly whose security does your credit card company have in mind? Here's a hint: It's probably not yours.

[B]asically, 3-D Secure [MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa] provides economic security rather than technical security -- but not for you, the customer. It's providing extra security for the banks by passing the buck.

(Read more)