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effect of Remember Me on This Computer. Select this check box only if you’re on your home computer. Alternatively, some Web sites remember you by default and offer an I Am on a Public Computer check box to bypass it, and you should select this whenever you are not on your home computer. If you can’t tell whether a particular Web site will remember you, I recommend using that site only on computers that belong to you. Figure 15-8: The Google Gmail service allows you to specify whether your login information should be remembered. Limit access to your computer. The Firefox Password Manager remembers your login information for you so you don’t have to keep entering it when you return to Web sites. Although this is convenient, it might be undesirable if you share a single computer with other people, such as family members or co-workers. Unless you trust the other people who have access to your computer, you might want to disable the Password Manager or use its Master Password feature, as I describe in Chapter 8. TECHNICAL STUFF How they do it While your computer takes its sweet time booting up, hackers are guessing thousands and thousands of letter combinations to crack a victim’s password. How do they do it? And better yet, where can we common folk get such fast computers? The truth is that hackers use the same kinds of computers that you and I use, but with a few differences. One is that hackers aren’t actually using the computer interactively; they’re using the computer only to try passwords endlessly until the correct one is found. This means they don’t care to see a helpful error message or click an OK button when the wrong password is tried. Their programs run automatically and very quickly without any human interaction until the correct password is found. The second and most important difference is that hackers aren’t limited to a single computer. Instead, they can network multiple computers together and have them work in parallel to multiply the processing power and reduce the length of the operation. For example, while one computer is trying all the words beginning with A, another computer could try all the B words, and so forth. The worst part comes when you ask that burning question: Where do those additional computers come from? Unfortunately, one way or another, the computer supplier is typically you or someone like you. Either the hacker purchases additional computers with the money he obtains by stealing a victim’s banking information, or he is actually using a victim’s computer directly because he stole the victim’s password. Yes, you read that correctly: Many hackers take control of victims’ computers and put them to work guessing other would-be victims’ passwords. In this way, hacking is a viciously self-supporting endeavor. Most modern Web sites try to counter or slow a hacker’s ability to guess a user’s password by pausing a second or two before revealing whether a guessed password is correct or not, or by preventing users who use an incorrect password three times from logging in. These measures have been fairly successful at staving off hackers. Another silver lining is that the same networking technique (called distributed computing) used by hackers to guess passwords is also used by leading scientists and researchers worldwide for the benefit of mankind. Many researchers who require enormous amounts of computing power to solve the problem they’re working on distribute a program you can download to "donate" your computer’s processing power to the research effort. When you aren’t using your computer, these programs use your computer to work on complex mathematical calculations and submit the results back to the researchers. Although your computer is only solving a miniscule portion of the overall problem, researchers can aggregate all the data they receive to figure out the larger picture. Two of the most famous projects to use this method are Stanford’s Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu), which seeks to understand protein folding and
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