Interesting article in the Washington Post on how the Secret Service uses distributed computing to break encryption.

Of course, I can’t let this pass without saying a few words.

That’s an improvement over the common misconception that the set of all people who use encryption are likely to be criminals. But it also doesn’t make much sense — what is the correlation between “having things to hide” and “knowing how to properly hide things”? If there is a connection, the interesting corollary is that criminals are by-and-large smarter than corporate America.

There’s a very decent random password generator in Mac OS X, but it’s “hidden” in the usual sense — buried in subfolders, not immediately obvious in the UI, and completely unadvertised. (Find it in Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access.) But I’d love to hear someone tell me how to overcome the problem that my nonrandom passwords are in my muscle memory, and I fear the switch will be as difficult and annoying as converting to Dvorak was.

Prediction: look for an article in November sometime about how compromised Windows machines in DHS are exposing this code to unforeseen intrusions. You can’t do much against a distributed codebase, but you can certainly gum up the works.

Okay, sooner than November. Oy.