Password rules are bullshit Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules. The world is absolutely awash in terrible password rules... But I don't need to tell you this. The more likely you are to use a truly random password generation tool, like us über-geeks are supposed to, the more likely you have suffered mightily - and daily - under this regime. We can certainly debate whether "correct horse battery staple" is a viable password strategy or not, but the argument here is mostly that length matters. Coding Horror

Nearly 200,000 WiFi cameras open to hacking right now What started as an analysis of a simple security flaw in a random wireless IP camera turned into seven vulnerabilities that affect over 1,250 camera models and expose nearly 200,000 cameras to hacking. The flaws affect a generically named product called Wireless IP Camera (P2P) WIFICAM, manufactured by a (currently unnamed) Chinese company, who sells it as a white-label product to several other camera vendors. Bleeping Computer (also, Dahua, Hikvision IoT devices under siege)

The little-known iPhone feature that lets blind people see with their fingers A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice's speed so high, I couldn't understand a word it was saying. And here's the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone's battery lasted forever. Yahoo

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games Deus Ex. System Shock 2. Dishonored. Some of the PC's most celebrated games belong to a genre called the immersive sim, which emphasizes creating a complex world with tons of player freedom. They're some of our favorite games to talk about, and at the 2017 Game Developer's Conference we were lucky enough to do just that. PC Gamer

Microsoft pledges to use ARM server chips, threatening Intel's dominance In the never-ending quest to improve computing technology, IBM has just taken a big step smaller: It's found a way to store data on a single atom. A hard drive today takes about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of data – a 1 or 0. The IBM Research results announced Wednesday show how much more densely it might someday be possible to cram information. Bloomberg

Backscatter your own fm pirate radio station If you live in a city, you're constantly swimming in a thick soup of radio-frequency energy. FM radio stations put out hundreds of kilowatts into the air. Students at the University of Washington, [Anran Wang] and [Vikram Iyer], asked themselves if they could harness this background radiation to transmit their own FM radio station, if only locally. The answer was an amazing yes. Hackaday

Cloudflare's next big business? Protecting your car from hackers With multiple proven attacks on modern vehicles, the biggest car makers in the world are asking the question: How best to protect fleets from hackers? Cloudflare, the San Francisco company that provides security and content delivery for 6 million websites, thinks it has the answer. It's planning to make waves in the burgeoning vehicular cybersecurity market in the coming years, says CEO Matthew Prince... Forbes

Bring the power of your apps into Gmail with Add-ons Few things are as satisfying as completing a task. But at work, it's not always so easy. The days are short and packed with to-dos, like following up on sales leads, logging support tickets or sending invoices. And while great apps exists to tackle these workstreams, most users have to flip between them and their inbox because email is still "central command" for task management. Google

Writing good code: how to reduce the cognitive load of your code Low bug count, good performance, easy modification. Good code is high-impact, and is perhaps the main reason behind the existence of the proverbial 10x developer. And yet, despite it's importance, it eludes new developers. Literature on the subject usually amounts to disconnected collections of tips. How can a new developer just memorize all that stuff? "Code Complete", the greatest exponent in this matter, is 960 pages long! Chris Maioli Mackeprang

Our new (mixed) reality: Early adopters have become HoloLens believers at work It's been roughly two years since Microsoft unveiled its augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR) HoloLens headset and about one year since the first publicly available dev kits went on sale. But ever since launching this impressive piece of tech, Microsoft has instead seemed content with letting Virtual Reality (VR) take the limelight. Ars Technica

Flappy Bird running on my home build BASIC computer In 2014 BASIC became a 50 year old programming language, to celebrate that event I started writing my own BASIC interpreter. How hard could that be? Just a few evenings of work and I would have coded my own... Well, 3 years later I can say I have hit a certain milestone, I can now play flappy bird, written in my own version of BASIC running on my home build computer. vandenbran.de

Preinstalled malware targeting mobile users The Check Point Mobile Threat Prevention has recently detected a severe infection in 38 Android devices, belonging to a large telecommunications company and a multinational technology company. While this is not unusual, one detail of the attacks stands out. In all instances, the malware was not downloaded to the device as a result of the users' use, it arrived with it. Check Point

An interactive chronology of every Star Wars game Late last year, I attended a PAX Australia panel titled X-wings and TIE-ins[1], which advertised itself as "A brief history of very bad (and some not so bad) Star Wars games." The panel was enjoyable and seemed well pitched toward its audience, but it didn't dive as deeply into the chronology of Star Wars titles as I had hoped. Cheese Talks

SK telecom exec talks 5G tech, 2017 trials Around the globe, telecom companies are placing bets on which technologies will define 5G, the next generation of wireless and cellular networks. Many have already published results from early lab tests and field trials. Now, executives are eager to move into real-world pilots and, gradually, to commercial deployments. IEEE Spectrum

Mossberg: Tech's ruling class casts a big shadow Back in 2011, I was talking with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, backstage at our D9 conference, when he made a casual reference to a "Gang of Four" companies that he believed ruled the consumer tech industry. Once on stage, I asked him about that term. The Verge

What is the best thermal paste 2017? - Thermal paste comparison Following on from our previous 'Which is the best thermal paste' article and testing we did back in 2015, I decided to create another; this time with a current-gen Intel Core i7-7700K processor and with a couple more thermal pastes added into the mix. Play3r