Links for 2011-01-09

"As I noted the last time around, there seems to be a trend for Hugo nominators to stay comfortably inside their reading boxes--comics by folks already famous in other corners of SFF, like Neil Gaiman or Paul Cornell, or easily accessible webcomics that deal with comfortable tropes. (Which is not to say that Girl Genius wasn't a deserving winner; just that it's been two years in a row, now.) Compare the Eisner Awards with the Hugo for Graphic Story and there are startling discrepancies.

It's pretty easy to fix that problem, if voters haven't read widely in comics but want to: provide a list of eligible comics and some recommendations."

"Security companies and IT people constantly tells us that we should use complex and difficult passwords. This is bad advice, because you can actually make usable, easy to remember and highly secure passwords. In fact, usable passwords are often far better than complex ones.

So let's dive into the world of passwords, and look at what makes a password secure in practical terms."