TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

I was donated an older WinXP desktop by my dad, but it had multiple levels of password protection. First, the Optiplex BIOS had the password set.  After some mucking about, I discovered that the password reset jumper needed to be in "reset" position when booting the machine.  It actually says "Password disabled" when you've done it right.  Just moving the jumper with the machine off and/or unplugged doesn't do anything. The BIOS user /boot password was also set, but didn't appear to affect anything. The kicker was the Windows XP logins.  My dad tried over a dozen user/password combinations, but none worked.  I had read about a method to reset XP passwords using the original installation CD-ROM and product key.  It was a Dell, so it had the product key sticker on the case.  But it looked like a time-consuming and cumbersome option.  There are also commercial options between $20 and $50, but there were enough solutions out there that I fig...

Like 6.5 million (or so) others, my password was in the list recently taken from LinkedIn . I somewhat naively used one of my "better" passwords on LinkedIn.  Silly me for assuming that a site like that would actually use strong encryption and the latest security practices.  That they did not has me rather puzzled.  Encryption is not hard to buy, is it?  IT security practices - well, ok, there always seems to be another exploit out there, and the possibility of compromising a login will never really go away.  But why use anything other than the best possible encryption?  I really don't know.  Cost?  Probably. Still, I had a minor advantage in that thanks to a previous hack on a different site, I had learned to use different passwords around the net.  So theoretically, I should be mostly covered. But that does not really save you.  Or, at least, not to the extent that you might assume. 6,500,000 passwords is a lot.  More...