Bill Katz

Adobe Share service lets you store and share documents online. To test the service, I tried to use the embed feature to share a short story. Unfortunately, my Drupal blog filters some of the crucial tags, even using the "full HTML" setting.

Last weekend, Audible unveiled their Wordcast system for tracking spoken word downloads. It's an innovative system that packages hosting, support, and most importantly, a system that supplies a number of tools and metrics necessary to advertisers -- dynamic ad insertion, measuring how many people actually heard the ads, relaying where they stop listening, etc. It's a system that's technically not possible with MP3 because it requires callbacks to the server; you can't figure out whether a downloaded file is actually played unless the player tells you, and you certainly can't track forwarded programs unless there's a callback.

Most web sites are protected by passwords that have been transformed into long hashes using presumably one-way functions. You enter a password like "cat" and the hashing function translates this into a unique and long string of characters like "FEAFjelaKFJAOWI0382lFKEFKJ..." If you store only the hash (the transformed password) into the database, crackers who read the hash strings still can't generate the original password because the reverse operation, going from long hash to original password, takes a long long time.

The Register has an article on the use of "rainbow tables", massive tables of precomputed hashes, to quickly crack passwords encoded using six hash algorithms including web site favorites MD5 and SHA-1. But note that rainbow tables are useless if you use a salt (initialization vector) which appends some known random bytes to the password. If you use a salt, the reverse operation now has to handle two different strings and the operation becomes much more difficult.

Summary: Yahoo! accidently deleted an entire web hosting service for my father-in-law's business. No warning, no cause, no e-mail to any of the addresses of the account holder (me) or any of the service administrators. On Friday morning, the account was closed for "other reason" by a program. Several people at Yahoo Billing could not tell me why the account was unilaterally closed. But the business got no e-mail or web hosting for a full business day, and no assurance was made that the web files (of any date) could be recovered or the e-mail accounts restored. The full horror story is below.