You may have noticed on magazine advertisements, or business cards and product labels, in fact in many places, a small square printed object like the one to the right. The object is a Quick Response or QR code. They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. They have been in use for years in Japan and Asia and are showing up all over the place in the US.

While they sort of look like a bar code they are much more useful. They can store (and digitally present) much more data, including URL links, Geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them.

QR Codes

Keep Your Site Administration Passwords Secure and Safe

Recently one of my client's web sites was hacked using a cracked password. We all need to be reminded from time to time how important it is to keep our user credentials secure.  Fortunately the hacker did no damage to the site. Visitors to who cruised the official site were unaffected. The hacker parked malware infected pages on the server. The foreign pages attracted visitors interested in free software, cheap goods etc. Once the pages were discovered and removed all was good again. It could have been much worse. The foreign content could have been pornography or the hacker could have been much more malicious by destroying the site.

Passwords and Security