Some Days...

Today has been fairly challenging for me insofar as technology is concerned.

My first surprise was an email from Facebook telling me that

"A new unknown device logged into your Facebook account (Thursday, 01 September 2011 at 15:51)"

- well, I was at work at ten-to-four yesterday afternoon, so I know that it wasn't me! Strangely, my daughter also got a similar message, so it's entirely possible that this is a false alarm, but I don't take chances with security: time to change passwords.

Of course, the problem with a potential account compromise is that any infiltrator may have gained access via one of the email accounts associated with the account, so I also changed my email account passwords - or at least, I tried to change my email account passwords! It seems that one of my email account providers only accepts passwords between 8 & 16 characters long and only those that contain letters and (at least) one number - that's only a 95 bit password and not particularly secure! Doubtless, had I bothered to read these instructions, my task would have been so much simpler, but I was too busy trying to convince the dialog to accept a 210 bit password that contained all manner of characters.

Any way, I sorted it all out eventually and then decided to delete my Facebook account. It's too high in maintenance costs for my tastes and, notwithstanding its latest moves to secure users' privacy, it often plays fast and loose with users' personal details. When I came to post a quick note here to let people know that my account was in the process of being deleted, I got another surprise:

Opera Upgrade

It seems that blogger doesn't support Opera 11.51!

Any way, I'm leaving Facebook and, if my friends need to know what I'm up to, I can be contacted via Karmic Odyssey. As for my intended post (on enabling Kubuntu's Desktop Effects on unsupported video cards), that'll have to wait until another day!

Sources & References:

• Schneier on Security: Facebook Privacy Guide