• xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe
• Penny Arcade Volume 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
• Penny Arcade Volume 2: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
• Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weiner
• The Most Dangerous Game: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weiner

People with a credit card stored on their account do little to increase their security other than avoiding very weak passwords such as "123456". Unsurprisingly, people who change their password from time to time tend to select the strongest ones.

Password strength is measured in bits, where cracking one bit is equivalent to the chance of correctly calling a fair coin toss, and each additional bit doubles the password's strength. On average, Bonneau found that user-chosen passwords offer less than 10 bits of security against online attacks, meaning it would only take around 1000 attempts to try every possible password, and around 20 bits of security against offline attacks.

That's surprising, because even a randomly chosen six-character password composed of digits and upper and lower case letters should offer 32 bits of security. Bonneau says the discrepancy is due to people picking much easier passwords than those theoretically allowed. He suggests assigning people randomly chosen nine-digit numbers instead, which would offer 30 bits of security against every type of attack – a 1000-fold increase in security on average. "I think it's reasonable to expect people to have the capacity to remember that, because they do it for phone numbers," he says.

• Stephen Wolfram posted an analysis of his emails/keystrokes/phonecalls for the past decade or so. If he ever publishes the raw data, it'll be pretty simple to figure out all of his passwords. [url]
• XKCD covers lifeloggers with a nice comic that summarizes a typical technogeek dad. "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was 5 years ago, but now I don't want to get any older." [url]
• Ben Fogarty plotted his life in a stacked area chart from age 0 to 32. It's a cool chart, but the area under "listening" as an activity makes it look like he went deaf at age 27. [url]
• To find some more bizarre/crazy stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]  

"Doonesbury" has been on the Web for 15 years, and the site actually makes a little money -- unheard-of for media sites. But it's not really a plan, just a presence. I don't believe there's anything I can do personally to prepare for a post-newspaper future, other than hope that the large media companies will come to their senses and form a gated Web collective along the lines of cable TV. They need to form a news utility, financed by subscription or micropayments because going it alone has been disastrous for all of them.

In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record -- admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence -- but not so much for convenience.

Publishing a book is an extension of the selling of items like T-shirts and posters, which pays the bills, he said, to a "free culture" mind-set about the cartoons themselves. "We have been encouraging people to share things, saying that it is a good business decision," he said....

One trick in transferring the material from online to print has been how to recreate the "title text" that comments on the strip when your cursor hovers over it.

"It's not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn't laugh, you'll laugh at this," he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.

Does that mean that the book won't carry a traditional copyright and instead take its lead from the online comic strip itself, which Mr. Munroe licenses under Creative Commons, allowing noncommercial re-use as long as credit is given?

"To anyone who wants to photocopy, bind, and give a copy of the book to their loved one -- more power to them," he said. "He/She will likely be disappointed that you're so cheap, though."