Well, it’s been a week hasn’t it? The title of this post is from an old song we used to sing as kids (and it also shows up in various lyrics, game controllers and other places), where we would alternate between squats, jumps and spins. It was fun. But it’s also quite apt for this week, for those of us in America it was election day, and after a rather contentious 2 years (that felt like 4) of campaigns, flaming rhetoric and social media carnage, the country has spoken and in January we will see a new administration.

Passwords. Easily the most susceptible element of our privacy and protecting ourselves and our information. Here’s the problem, incredibly well captured by XKCD: There’s a whole long backstory, but the TL;DR is that for a long while there was thinking that “complex” passwords were the best form of security, largely because at that point in time, the compute power required to “crack” those passwords was difficult to come by. Fast forward to today and your average complex password has zero chance against a standard desktop class machine never mind some actual high powered compute resource, and the worst part is that this has led to humans choosing repeatable and easily guessed variations of passwords … incrementing numbers, replacing letters with numbers or symbols … all pointless exercises as the Bad Actors know you do this and simply include that variation.

Whether you are working from home or just living, at this point in time you should have some level of security at home. In this post I’m going to explore the basics. Pros and prosumers, you can stop reading here, you know all this :) OK, so what exactly are .. The Basics? Let’s start with 3 fundamentals. Use an Authenticator app for your most important stuff Install patches and updates Configure an upstream DNS filtering service Authenticator Apps # This might sound scary and complicated, but it’s really not.