I plan to do the Oslo marathon in September. I tend to only exercise once per month, usually by running somewhere between 15 and 20 km. Yesterday I decided to cycle 50 km instead. Then today I felt that wasn’t enough so I decided to do a short 6 km run as well. But then I felt hungry as I walked out the door, so I stopped at the local shop and bought three doughnuts and two chocolate bars. After 5 km of running, my stomach was churning so much I had to stop. I suspect I need a better training regime

I occasionally receive questions from folks wanting to know how to secure their Facebook accounts due to them being being compromised. I am no expert on such matters, but here’s what I do (which seems to have worked so far) …

Password

Make sure you have a kick butt password. 12 characters with a mixture of upper and lower cases, numbers and special characters ought to do the trick. You Norwegians should inject an å, ø or æ in there to boost your protection. To be sure you aren’t using a mind numbingly dumb password (I can guarantee many of you will be), go test it on Steve Gibson’s password haystacks page. If you have real words in there, make sure it’s longer than 12 characters as real words or names are much easier to crack.

If you think that these passwords are ridiculously long, think again.

Multi-factor authentication

This is something I have been lazy on. I have been protecting my Google account with this for years and for the past six months or so have been using it on my website login, but I always figured my Facebook account was of minimal value so never bothered. This evening I decided that was a bit silly and implemented this myself. By setting up multifactor authentication, you will be forced to use your phone as a method of authenticating to Facebook. You will need to punch a code in that you generate via your phone. You can also use third party apps to do this, which is really handy as it means you can use things like the Google Authenticator app. for your phone which avoids having to load the silly Facebook app. just to login.

https

There’s a setting in Facebook which allows you to force it to use https, or at least there used to be. Last I heard, this does not actually work as well as it should, but in theory it should mean that any time you access anything from Facebook.com, that it should be sent via an https connection, which means that no one between you and Facebook itself can snoop in on what you are looking at. There is a possibility of a “man in the middle” attack, but this should be obvious as the little green lock icon should disappear from your browser and you may see security warnings appearing.

Conclusion

The above advice should keep your account under wraps. These don’t protect against certain types of attacks, in particular it does not protect against click jacking. There’s not much you can do about that apart from being careful what you click on.

No security system is fool-proof, but these basic precautions should at least allow you to avoid entirely losing your whole account (hopefully).

If you have any other tips, please post them in the comments below 🙂

PS: One last tip … don’t use Windows. It’s possible that malware on your computer is causing problems and since malware is most prevalent on Windows, then changing to another operating system will likely avoid that issue.

I’m waiting in München before heading to Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania. The Germans certainly do know a thing or two about good beer.

Remember. The most scary thing about a hacker is their smell … http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

A crude story for Norwegian class. This hasn’t been proof read and is definitely riddled with errors. No need to correct as we’ll be reviewing this in class 🙂

Vi har ny loven i New Zealand.
Vi hadde “Civil Union” før nå. De laget loven for “Civil Union” i 2004. Personer i “Civil Union” ha alle samme lik å heteroseksual personer. Noen tenkt at vi skulle drepe gifter fordi gifter er religiose, men det var problemer for “Civil Union” personer hvem gå til andre land. Andre land ikke forstår om “civil union”. Så vi trengtet en ny loven for homoseksual gift.

Vi har ny loven og homoseksual personer kan gifter hver andre nå.

Det var veldig morsomt tid i New Zealand stortinget. De hadde stor synger og fest. Det er ikke så felles [common] i New Zealand stortinget.

Vi har en andre loven nå også. De sa at ingen patenter for datamaskin applikasjoner. Det er stor problemer for datamaskin applikasjoner fra datamaskin patenter. New Zealand er nå den eneste land med uten datamaskin patenter.

A casual afternoon run with Karl turned into a 17.75 km adventure.

I ran the Sentrumsløpet in Oslo. 10 km in 61.5 mins in 2012 and 53 mins 46 seconds in 2013! There’s a dip in speed during the middle section as I got a really unpleasant cramp. Hopefully I can do even better for 2014 🙂

Here’s the trace from my Nike running watch.