Cookies are small bits of data that a website can place on your system, requesting your browser to send them back to the website the next time you visit. Cookies are a way of making personalizing w [..]

Patches for programs that bypass copy protection schemes. Culture: Cracking programs is its own little underground 'scene' independent of other hacking activities. Groups and individuals [..]

Generally refers to strong (unbreakable) encryption. Web-browsers contain an option for 40-bit vs. 128-bit encryption. The United States only allows export of the weaker version in order to allow th [..]

The term "40-bit encryption" refers to the U.S. encryption export laws (note: in January, 2000, the U.S. upped the maximum size to 64-bits. The U.S. restricts the export of "strong en [..]

56-bit encryption contains 16-more bits than 40-bit encryption, and is therefore 65536 times more difficult to crack. On the other hand, it is likewise 256 times easier to crack than 64-bit encrypti [..]

In January of 2000, the U.S. government eased its export regulations of encryption 40-bit to 64-bit keys. Presumably, the government would only do so if the NSA had the capability of decrypting 64 [..]

Some systems, like Win9x and Solaris, limit the user to 8 characters in the password. Key point: Security conscious users of such systems need to make sure they use a more random mix of characters [..]

On UNIX, a home directory can be referenced by using a tilde (~) followed by their login name. For example, "ls ~rob" on my computer will list all the files in "/home/rob". Key [..]

On UNIX, this is a virtual-file that can be written to. Data written to this file gets discarded. It is similar to the file call NUL on Windows machines. Key point: When rooting a machine, hacker [..]

The directory on UNIX where the majority of the configuration information is kept. It is roughly analogous to the Windows registry. Of particular interest is /etc/passwd file that stores all the p [..]