Experiencing a MEME

 

Now as I am sure you are aware the Internet can be a very strange place especially when it comes to the Internet MEME so here is a look at one of the strangest ones. I you have any Internet MEMEs that you want to share or even your own pictures please feel free to post the below.

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On April 6, 2009,New York-based artist David Horvitz, known for his quirky DIY projects, posted a picture of himself with his head in a freezer on his Flickr account. Under the photo read:

That same day, a friend of Horvitz posted another photo using the same freezer. Two weeks later, 241543903.com was created, with the intention of “Experiencing a MEME in the Making.”

For those of you who don’t know, a meme is essentially a unit of culture (weird way of putting it, I know, but think along the lines of a video, an idea, or a catchphrase) that spreads, in this case via the Internet, and essentially goes viral. With 241543903.com, Horvitz and friends attempted to document this idea as it evolved into a meme.

And, oh, did it ever. By January 2010, there were over 100 photos with the caption “241543903” on Flickr alone. In today’s world, with Lady Gaga videos getting millions of views on YouTube within mere minutes, 100 photos may not seem like a lot. But this project, remember, is not just Internet-based. These 100+ people found out about the project, left their computers, physically stuck their heads into their freezers, took photos, and posted them online. When looked at from that perspective, 100 is quite a lot of people.

And that was just in January. Since then, the project has expanded from Flickr to other social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Tumblr. And if you do a Google image search of 241543903 right this second, over 5,000 photos show up, all of different people, all around the world, sticking their heads in various freezers.

My favorite part about the project, aside from its undeniable success at achieving what it set out to achieve, is the variety of photos that people took. I love that the project is very straight-forward (“take a picture with your head in the freezer”) and yet open to endless interpretations. Here are a few of my favorite 241543903 pictures (I’d love to see the customers’ reaction to the person who stuck his head in a freezer at the supermarket), but, as you know, you can do a Google search and find which ones you like best.

241543903.com was created a year a half ago, but it’s still very active. The blog is filled with video documentation of the project, video responses from participants, and updates from the creators. Also check out knowyourmeme.com, a site that documents various memes around the globe, including the Heads in Freezers (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/241543903). Who knows? Maybe it’ll inspire you to create your own meme, and maybe one day it’ll catch on and Radar will do a Pulse feature on it. One can only dream.

And don’t forget to stick your head in the freezer!

Five Free Sites To Creating Your Own Comics

 

In the days of cold, hard newsprint, only people who could draw were successful comic strip authors. In some cases, this resulted in comic strips that had very nice pictures, but weren’t all that funny. Thankfully, the Internet has taught us not to accept an inferior form of comic artistry, but a more flexible one.

Comic strip enthusiasts who want funny but don’t care about pretty drawing can have their strips, those who want artistry have theirs, and even those with very specific tastes can find something just right.

The best part about these developments is that they allow you, regardless of any talent as an artist or comedian, to create your very own comic strip. Depending on what you’re going for, you can use one of these six sites to help you do it.

1. MakeBeliefsComix.com

MakeBeliefsComix.com is easy enough for children to use, but there are enough options for adults to get a message across, too. Users can choose from 25 characters to fill a two-, three-, or four-paneled comic strip. Currently, the site supports typing in seven different languages. There are plans to add Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in the future.

One limiting factor is color. Though you can choose a background color, the characters remain black and white. If you’re planning on printing your comic strip, this could be a good opportunity to pull out the old-fashioned box of crayons. But if you’re planning on sharing it online, it’s a bit restricting.

The pre-set options that make the site so easy to use can also be slightly limiting. Your comic strips will look pretty generic. There are only about four different expressions for each character. The upside of this is that you can finish a perfectly respectable online comic in about ten minutes.

The creator, Bill Zimmerman, is the author of 18 books — including Make Beliefs: A Gift For Your Imagination. “My hope is that by giving you a choice of characters with different moods and the chance to write words and thoughts for them,” he writes on the site, “you will tap into your creativity and explore new possibilities.”

2. MarvelKids.com’s Create Your Own Comic

If there’s any company that knows what it takes to build great comics, Marvel Characters does. So it’s no surprise that its DIY comic site is pretty awesome, considering its simplicity.

Features that make it awesome include choices for different styles of panels (not into boxes? try zig zags), the set-up for creating up to a 22-page comic book, and the Photoshop-esque tool dock that moves around the page. Your character choices include the stars of the Super Hero Squad Show, including The Hulk, Falcon, and Wolverine.

The site does have some rough patches. If you’re hoping to create an original-looking comic strip, you’re out of luck, because you are limited to Marvel characters. There are a measly five options for objects, and you can’t change the background. With no option to save your work on the site, it’s also unlikely you’ll be completing a full 22-page comic book in one sitting.

3. ToonDoo

ToonDoo hits the fine balance between creative versatility and user friendliness, ensuring that the final results look sharp. While there’s still an extensive library of characters and objects to use in your comic strip, there are also tools to create your own touches. The TraitR tool allows you to create custom characters and DoodlR lets you paint freely. If you want to use your own photos or another image in your comic strip, you can manipulate it through the ImagineR photo tool.

Unlike other sites, there’s an option to save your project mid-creation so that you can come back to it later. When you finish a handful of ToonDoos, you can compile a book. It’s easy to embed individual cartoons in a website or share them over networks, and you can buy print-quality images of your favorites.

4. Strip Generator

The stoic characters of Strip Generators lend themselves to sarcastic commentary. There’s not a whole lot of opportunity to create a personal style — you need to work with what the site gives you — but that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. The community topic-themed galleries are testimony to this (check out the current theme, “Autumn”).

One unique capability is adjustable frames. If you need a specific cell to be a bit wider or longer, you can just drag the wall. Another stand-out trait is the personal library. When you tweak an image to get it just right, you can save it to use again later.

5. Pikistrips

Pikistrips takes your photos (er…”Pikis?”) and turns them into comic strips. Once you upload your favorites into a customizable comic cell format, you’re free to add text bubbles, speech bubbles, and objects. The object gallery is pretty extensive, and its contents aren’t random. Many of the categories — like hairstyles, hats, mustaches, scars, and tattoos — wouldn’t be much fun without using your own photos as a canvas. If you miss the cartoon look, you can apply the “comic” effect to your photo or choose from seven others.

All in all, this site is fun for tweaking your photos (also see the related Pikipimp.com), but is intended to boost the company’s custom printing business (you guessed it, “pikiprint”).

Final word:

This is your opportunity to have your own comic strip featured on Caintech.co.uk send you comics into help@caintech.co.uk and I will feature the best ones on my site.

Can a Hacker Guess Your Passwords?

Strong passwords are the first line of defense against identity theft

We use passwords so often that it’s easy to lose sight of just how critical a password really is: one of the best defenses we have against cybercrime is often the one we take the least seriously.

After a hacking incident in 2009, InformationWeek analyzed the login information of the site’s 20,000 users and found that most passwords were ones a hacker could guess in seconds. The most common passwords? 123456 and password.

Don’t make it this easy for the cyber criminals—create strong passwords that are easy for you to remember but hard for others to guess.

Why you need strong passwords

It can be tempting to use an easy-to-remember sequence like a birth date or cell phone number as a password. But don’t. Many systems have been broken into due to weak passwords, which are passwords that can be easily guessed or can be quickly decoded by a cracking program.

A password cracking program is a tool that runs through a list of possible passwords, one-by-one, until it hits on the right combination; it can process tens of thousands of different passwords in one second. The list of possible passwords the program uses can include commonly used passwords, dictionary words, and information specific to you, such as your birth date.

Once your password is known, a hacker can tap into your private information and do all sorts of damage, ranging from reading your personal emails and creating fake postings on your profile page to robbing your bank accounts and stealing your identity.

Tips for creating a strong password

4 Password Dos

• Use long passwords. The longer your password is, the better. Use a password that has at least 8 characters, and for your high-security accounts, security experts recommend even longer passwords: at least 14 characters. (How can you remember 14 characters? See “Consider building passwords based on phrases” below for some ideas.)
• Mix it up. Use a mix of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols—the more types of characters you use in your password, the harder it is to guess.

  To illustrate: For an 8-character password with all lowercase letters, a cracking tool would be able to run through every possible combination in 2.42 days. By mixing in uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols, the tool would take 210 years to run through every combination.

• Use text that’s not in a dictionary. A password cracking program can check millions of dictionary words in seconds. Avoid “real” words that can be found in a dictionary.
• Change passwords regularly. Change your passwords on a regular basis. Every 60-90 days is the recommendation of most security advisors; you may want to change them more or less often depending on the security of the information the password is protecting.

4 Password Don’ts

• Don’t use ‘password’. The word password and variations such as password1, passwd, p@$$w0rd, and drowssap (password spelled backwards) are so common that many hackers start with these.
• Don’t use easy-to-guess patterns. Don’t use a sequence of characters (like 123456 or abc123), repeated characters (ioioio), or patterns that use characters that are close together on the keyboard (qwerty).
• Don’t use your name or other personal characteristics. Don’t use your first or last name, and don’t use terms associated with your personal life that others may know, like the name of your spouse or children, names of pets, license plate numbers, and phone numbers.
• Don’t use the same passwords for every account. The risk in using the same password for multiple accounts is that if someone figures out one password, that person now has access to everything else. For the utmost in security, use a different password for every password-protected program, web site, and account that you use. It’s particularly critical that you not re-use your email account password on web sites because once it’s compromised, the door is opened to all your accounts that have your email address on file.

Consider building passwords based on phrases

The truth is that a long string of random characters can be hard to remember, especially when you have a lot of different passwords to keep track of.

One strategy is to use passwords that are built from easily remembered phrases. You take the first letters from each of the words in the phrase, and you also mix in some symbols and numbers in place of certain words, like using & to replace “and.”

Here are a few examples of strong passwords built on phrases:

• M2010nyri2l15# (“My 2010 new year’s resolution is to lose 15 pounds”)
• Lmu?i:Wayd4o? (“Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?”)
• Iw2Tls&cw2gb! (“I went to Texas last summer and can’t wait to go back!”)

Make any security questions strong, too

Automated password resetting is a process that lets you reset your password if you ever forget your current one; it’s typically implemented by you setting up one or more security questions that you have to answer in order to gain access to your account. But if these questions are too simple, someone else may be able to easily guess the answers.

One example of this technique happened in 2008 when the email account of Sarah Palin, a nominee for Vice President of the United States, was broken into. The hacker was able to answer three security questions and illegally access Palin’s email simply by researching her zip code, her birthday, and where she met her husband.

For any account that offers password resetting, be sure to set up strong questions as well.

And remember–keep your passwords secret

The strongest of passwords won’t protect you if others can readily access it. Have you ever seen someone’s password written on a sticky note taped to their monitor? This is a bit like taping your car keys to the windshield—you can easily find your keys, but so can anyone else.

Here are a few tips on safeguarding your passwords:

• Don’t respond to any email that asks for your password or asks you to verify your password by sending it in. Reputable companies don’t use email to ask their customers for this information.
• When using public computers such as in airport lounges, internet cafes, and libraries, don’t access any sites that require a password. In these insecure locations, hackers can easily capture everything you type using keylogging devices.
• The old advice was to never write down your passwords, but with today’s reality, you can end up with dozens of different passwords—and it’s better to use multiple passwords than to just use the one or two passwords that you can memorize. So it’s OK to write down your passwords: just be sure to keep the list in a secure place that others can’t access, such as a locked drawer or a safe deposit box.

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