Steve Gibson, the president of Gibson Research Corporation (GRC), recently talked about on his show Security Now (on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network) a new tool he’s developed called Password Haystack.

The site states:

Every password you use can be thought of as a needle hiding in a haystack. After all searches of common passwords and dictionaries have failed, an attacker must resort to a “brute force” search – ultimately trying every possible combination of letters, numbers and then symbols until the combination you chose, is discovered.

If every possible password is tried, sooner or later yours will be found.
The question is: Will that be too soon . . . or enough later? 

This interactive brute force search space calculator allows you to experiment with password length and composition to develop an accurate and quantified sense for the safety of using passwords that can only be found through exhaustive search.

This is a great tool and because I can hear some of my paranoid friends crying foul, Steve is extremely trustworthy. To try out your password and see how hard it is to crack, you’re going to have to type it into the calculator.

This calculator is designed to help users understand how many passwords can be created from different combinations of character sets (lowercase only, mixed case, with or without digits and special characters, etc.) and password lengths. The calculator then puts the resulting large numbers (with lots of digits or large powers of ten) into a real world context of the time that would be required (assuming differing search speeds) to exhaustively search every password up through that length, assuming the use of the chosen alphabet.

Now if you’re smart, you should have multiple passwords for different accounts. Either way, Steve is not mining your passwords, nor will he have any idea what that “password” belongs to.

Give it a try.

To listen to the excerpt from the Security Now podcast where Steve Gibson explains the Password Haystack Calculator click on one of these links:

• 37 minute, high-quality, 64kbps MP3 audio file, 17.9 MB
• 37 minute, lower-quality, 16kbps MP3 audio file, 4.47 MB

This is the video I found:

This video is hilarious to say the least. The ending is particularly funny. I get why it’s a popular instrument at soccer matches and I have in fact witnessed it at a Napoli (Naples Italy) soccer game when I was studying abroad in Italy in 2003. At the time I had no idea what it was. All I remember is hearing this weird sound rumbling in the background continuously during the game. I can understand why people can’t stand it, but I can also see why people feel like it’s cheering on their team.

What do you think of the Vuvuzela? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Check it out!

GoAnimate.com: TWiT Trek by BrunoSerious

Check out the video, it’s really wild. Looks like fun, but that’s also a very expensive piece of equipment on Leo’s back.

Update: Jason Calacanis contacted me via Facebook today to tell me that there are plans to have ThisWeekIn.com be the place where all the shows are cataloged. Thanks Jason!

So for those who know me, know I’m a huge fan of Leo Laporte and the TWiT Network. Leo Laporte, a TechTV alumnus, Tech Guy radio show host, and the man behind the vision that is TWiT, is an amazing guy. He’s created such a brand for himself and all those involved.

On his main site he streams his shows live as well as providing audio and sometimes video of the shows. Now if you don’t watch the live stream, you might never know how big this brand actually is. But it’s actually much larger than what is seen by those who just go to the TWiT homepage.

There are 3 main players, or maybe even more, involved with the production these shows. Leo is the main one, of course. Then there is Jason Calacanis, of Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo.com fame, and Alex Lindsay of the Pixel Corps, a merry band of media guildsmen.

With just these three, there are at least three or more sites with different programming on it. Leo runs TWiT.tv, Jason runs ThisWeekinStartups.com (and he has This Week in Youtube on Youtube), and Alex runs a few shows over at PixelCorps.tv.

So you can see how it gets a bit confusing. I know what most people are going to say, “But you can find them all in iTunes.” That’s not the point. Not all of us like to use iTunes. I still go to the individual sites and download the mp3′s or watch/listen to the shows there. What’s more I’m sure there are plenty of new shows coming out on the TWiT Network, which those who are not die hard “live steam” watchers won’t know about.

There is nothing wrong with having unique shows with their own branded Websites or pages, but they should also be featured on the main TWiT site. I’m aware that the shows are not all produced by Leo or sometimes even his crew, but they should keep the “This Week In…” brand together in a cohesive group for both easy surfing and continuity.

Of course this is just my opinion. What do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.