2016-12-12——2016-12-16友邻

Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won't Protect You

 

You have a secret that can ruin your life. It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.

 

Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of you on holiday, on your birthday or doing selfies with your pets. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. We now know that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated concept. No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.

 

Look around. Hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists of usernames and passwords on the open web—are now regular occurrences. The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with devastating results. All a hacker has to do is use personal information that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.

 

The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. Passwords are as old as civilization. And for as long as they’ve existed, people have been breaking them. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.

 

a well-kept secret

dark secret, a secret that has negative connotations, negative meaning

eg.　　The house has a dark secret; it's haunted by the ghost of an old woman.

So we use this to say that something is a well known fact, it's not a secret, it's no secret that. It's not secret that.

b. It's no secret that they have been dating each other for months. 

since the dawn of

buy into the idea that...

a fallacy

Fallacy, it is an idea or belief that is false, not true, but many people think it's true.

regular occurrence　　更为常用common occurrence

hyper-

So we use it to talk about excess, excessive amount, exaggeration or having too much of something. So if you are hyperactive, you are too active. If you are hypercritical, you're too critical. If you're hypersensitive, you are too sensitive. 

to crack

to get into s omeone else's computer system without permission, and to get information from their computer or to do something ill egal using their computer without their knowing. So, you can crack a password, you can crack a system, you can crack a code and you can crack a problem. Now, native speaker usage, the two most commonly used are crack a code. They cracked the code, and then they could read the secret message, or crack a problem, I've been trying to solve this problem all week, but I still haven’t cracked it. So native speaker frequent use, crack a code, crack a problem.