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Not only poor people should experience this.
These words were quoted from Bill Gates as he unleashed a swarm of mosquitoes onto an audience he was in the middle of addressing.
This is going to make me sound like a huge geek.
But someone else has to tell me that this reminded them of the scene in X-Men the movie (2000) where Magneto tries to make all the world leader mutants with that special machine? It would seem rather fitting that Bill Gates infect a large group of powerful people with Malaria.
That’s the first thing that came to my mind when I read this. Luckily, the mosquitoes released were not carrying malaria. I’m glad he made his point though, but wow, what a way to do it.
Keepass Password Safe
I have always been a skeptic of password keepers. Putting all of your passwords in one place was never really an appealing idea. What happens if someone gets a copy of it and tries to brute force it? My train of thought always led me to not wanting to put all my eggs in one basket.
But what if that basket required two factor authentication (ooooh) and was encrypted with an AES 256bit key (aaaah)?
Keepass is one of those programs that I just started using and wondered how I ever got on without it. It has a nice security feature that you can enable, which makes use of a key file, generated with the help of using random mouse movements and random keyboard strokes (mash the pad).
You then need a combination of this key file and a password to gain access to the database. This is essentially a master password to all your other passwords, so make sure it’s not something simple to guess. In fact, using a passphrase with a few complex characters isn’t a bad idea either.
Brute force attacks are also prevented by encrypting the actual key X amount of times – this can be specified by you. Basically, increasing this number increases how long it takes to open the password database on your computer, but it would also increase the time required for each attempt in a brute force attack. If it takes a second longer to open on your computer, this would mean an exponential amount of time until the brute force attack was successful (if the attacker was still alive by then!).
A few points about Keepass
- It is quite flexible in setting timeouts and lockout actions (lock and minimise to tray after x, remove text from clipboard after x, etc).
- The entire contents of the database is encrypted – titles, usernames, notes, and of course, passwords.
- You can use keyboard shortcuts to enter usernames and passwords into fields in web browsers, avoiding the clipboard. This means you can have huge passwords and never have to remember them, or even type them.
- You can add attachments, though this greatly increases the amount of time needed to encrypt and decrypt the database