How To Find Out If Your Email Address Was Leaked Through Gawker’s Database

In December 2010 Gawker Medias entire network of websites was affected by an exploit that preyed on both staff and visitors. More than 1.5 million accounts were compromised by the attacks, and users' email addresses and their respective passwords were posted online for all to see.

If you are an active participant on any of Gawker's websites then you'll probably have changed your password by now (hint: do it). However, if you're not sure whether you've contributed any comments and would like to know for sure then you can check your email against the list to get the answer you need. You can then take appropriate action if you've fallen foul to the leak.

Why Such A Big Deal?

There's a reason you're strongly encouraged to use different passwords for different services. Had you signed up to Gawker's commenting system with your usual personal email address and used the same password you use to log into said email address then your email and password combination is freely available for all to see.

It has emerged since last month's attacks that a considerable amount of .gov, .edu and .mil (US military) email addresses were included in the leaked database. If these individuals had used the same password for their email login then government, education and military email addresses would be potentially compromised.

According to the hackers 2,650 used "password" or "qwerty" as a password including one .gov address, three .mil addresses and 52 from .edu addresses.

This is a prime example of how using a variety of passwords can really save your bacon. Should someone gain access to your email account then personal information like online banking or web hosting details is at the mercy of the intruder.

Ok, I'm Sufficiently Scared

Good, so you'll probably want to check if you're on the list. As the whole network of sites used the same shared commenting system, every Gawker site was affected. Many of these sites are popular and renowned for breaking news, reviews and their quirky nature.

Outlets include Lifehacker, Gawker (main site), Gizmodo, Kotaku, Fleshbot, io9, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Deadspin. If you have ever made a comment and used your own valid email address then you really should have changed your Gawker password, and any other services that use the same password.

Step 1

To check whether you've been affected you'll first need to change your email address into an MD5 hash, which you can do here. Simply enter your email in full, click md5 and copy the result to your clipboard.

Step 2

With your MD5 saved, go here and click Show Options. From the first drop-down box select MD5 and in the text field paste your MD5 hash and click Apply Filter.

If nothing appears then you're home dry, your account has not been compromised and you can sleep easy. If you do see a matching row but you've changed your password already – no worries, you acted fast.

If you see a matching row and have not changed your password then you'll want to change your Gawker password and any other passwords that match.

If you need a bit of help coming up with a couple of passwords, we've got an article covering that but please be careful and don't use too many shared passwords.

Did you get stung by Gawkergate? Learned your lesson from shared passwords? Still using "password" as your password? Tell us all about it in the comments below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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How To Reface Your Facebook Profile Using FB Photo Magic

Facebook has decided that all of its users' account will be upgraded to the new profile, which was introduced last December. Even though not everybody likes the arrangement that comes with the new profile, the new layout opens up to some cool "hacking" possibilities.

It's said that Alexandre Oudin - a French artist - was the first one who explored the possibilities of creatively "refacing" the new profile page. Since then, many people have come up with their own version of a personalized profile page. As the refacing process required some skills in photo editing and the tenacity to find the perfect arrangement, most of us couldn't (or wouldn't) join in the craze. But that was in the past. Today, everything can be done easily in a few steps with the help of an online tool called FB Photo Magic.

Let's Create Some Magic

If you want to join all the cool kids on Facebook, why don't you try to reface your own profile page? Go to the FB Photo Magic website and click the "Start" button.

Click "Choose File" to pick the picture that you want to upload and then click "Upload Photo". Based on my experiment, it's advisable to pre-process the photo prior to uploading it. Not only will you get the portion of the image that you want, but you will also get a smaller size compared to the original picture.

The first thing that you will notice after the uploading process is the drop down list of "Text lines". This list asks you to choose one of the numbers according to how many lines there are on your profile page.

To get the figure, go to your profile page and count the lines under your name next to your profile picture.

Then you can set the image template. You can resize the box and move it around.  The parts of the picture under the white boxes are the ones that will show up on your profile page. Adjust the boxes' position so that they will overlay portions of the image that you want to show.

Click the "Save" button at the top right corner of the page, then continue by clicking "Upload to Facebook".

A confirmation window will open, asking you to allow FB Photo Magic to access your Facebook account.

When everything is done, you'll see the success message along with quick instructions on how to set everything up.

Completing The Process

Now we are a few steps away before we finish the refacing process. To complete the journey, log into your Facebook account and go to the "Photos" page by clicking on the link in the sidebar under the profile picture. Then open the FB Photo Magic album.

Inside the album, you will see a set of "puzzle" photos that you've just created. Click on the last picture to open it. This last picture is the largest picture on the left that will be your profile picture.

Go to the lower part of the photo page and click on the link "Make Profile Picture".

Then click "Okay" in the confirmation window.

And you're done.

Just for the sake of the experiment, I created another set of profile pictures using my daughter's photo, activated it, and decided to keep the result (she's a lot more photogenic than I!)

An Alternative And Few Notes

FB Photo Magic is not the only application that you can use to reface your Facebook profile page. Another alternative that I found is Schweppes Profile App. The working process is similar to FB Photo Magic. However, during my experiment, I was always stuck on the "uploading to Facebook" step. But feel free to try it, maybe you'll have better luck.

Please note that even though I used FB Photo Magic with several images without any problem, one of the profile images that I got was distorted. So if you get distorted image, you could repeat the process or use alternative images. Use the "Preview" feature before uploading the result to Facebook.

Since the images shown on your profile page are actually images tagged with your name, it's possible that the set that you created is replaced by more recent set of images also tagged with your name. If this happens, you could hover above the images that you don't want and click on the "X" to close them. Doing this will not erase the images. You just keep them off your profile page.

I found that refacing my Facebook profile page is fun. You should try it yourself and enjoy the time when your friends beg you to tell them how to do it!

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Four Cheers Five Victor Borge

by Richard Lederer

The Comedian of the Keyboard, also known as The Unmelancholy Dane, exited the earthly stage December 23rd, 2000. Victor Borge, the irrepressible musical humorist, didn't quite make it into the true third millennium, but he lived almost 92 very full years and performed more than a 100 nights a year right up until the spotlight winked out.

Borge left the world a triple legacy. Born in Copenhagen to a family of musicians, Borge became a fine pianist and conductor. Too, he was that rare comedian who never used foul language and never made fun of anyone. "The smile is the shortest distance between two people," he observed. Most astonishingly, he became a genius in his second language English, which he learned by spending day after day in movie theaters.

Many years ago, Victor Borge created the game of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, he reasoned, why shouldn't language go up too? In English, there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, such as "wonder" (one), "before" (four) and "decorate" (eight). If we inflate each sound by one number, we come up with a string of puns "twoder," "befive" and "decornine."

Here is a story based on Borge's idea. This tale invites you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated wonder oops, make that "twoder" and to remember the linguistically pyrotechnic genius of The Clown Prince of Denmark.

JACK AND THE TWODERFUL BEANS

Twice upon a time there lived a boy named Jack in the twoderful land of Califivenia. Two day Jack, a double-minded lad, decided three go fifth three seek his fivetune.

After making sure that Jack nine a sandwich and drank some Eight-Up, his mother elevenderly said, "Threedeloo, threedeloo. Try three be back by next Threesday." Then she cheered, "Three, five, seven, nine. Who do we apprecinine? Jack, Jack, yay!"

Jack set fifth and soon met a man wearing a four-piece suit and a threepee. Fifthrightly Jack asked the man, "I'm a Califivenian. Are you two three?"

"Cerelevenly," replied the man, offiving the high six. "Anytwo five elevennis?"

"Not threeday," answered Jack inelevently. "But can you help me three locnine my fivetune?"

"Sure," said the man. "Let me sell you these twoderful beans."

Jack's inthreeition told him that the man was a three-faced triple-crosser. Elevensely Jack shouted, "I'm not behind the nine ball. I'm a college gradunine, and I know what rights our fivefathers crenined in the Constithreetion. Now let's get down three baseven about these beans."

The man tripled over with laughter. "Now hold on a third," he responded. "There's no need three make such a three-do about these beans. If you twot, I'll give them three you."

Well, there's no need three elabornine on the rest of the tale. Jack oned in on the giant and two the battle for the golden eggs. His mother and he lived happily fivever after and so on, and so on, and so fifth.

(YouTube link)

© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

http://www.neatorama.com/2011/01/25/four-cheers-five-victor-borge/