Not So Secure

Thanks to Vladimir Levenshtein and the ZXCVBN algorithm, I only score a 72. 

I try, I really do. When I sign into a new website or get prompted by an old one that my password is out of date, I try really hard to come up with something new and unique. Since I use a password manager to remember all my entries, my criteria has less to do about remembering those strings in my head, and more about manual entry. After all, while the software stores them and spits them back automatically when needed, I often have to input them myself on the go. And so my guiding principle isn't trying to remember some unwieldy sequence, but how easy it is to type. I have to hunt and peck "H%8;aw#_h!", but can bang out lOvE2eAtPeanuts! like a champion touch typist.

However, hard as it is to believe, hackers and their tools are smarter than me. According to a recent appraisal of my passwords, my score is firmly in "C" territory. True, it is better than some, while worse than others. But that is scarce comfort, considering that while I thought I was outsmarting would-be thieves with cute ditties I was doing no better than little Billy in the third row.

To be fair, some of that was not my doing. Your password health is made up of three factors with the first being compromised web sites. Since the first computer virus known as Creeper was discovered in the early 1970s, the speed of hacks has increased at warp speed. Now, 30,000 new websites on average are hacked every day, with over 53% of US citizens affected by cyber-attacks in 2022. According to IT Governance, a data protection company, there have been 953 incidents this year so far. In those incidents over 5.3 billion records have been exposed, with a single one related to the cyber security firm Darkbeam suffering a breach of over 3.8 billion records alone. So yes, there's a reasonable chance that someone has your info besides your spouse.

But in the areas I do control, according to the aforementioned metrics, it seems I'm not doing so good either. While I think I'm being clever, creating various passwords which to me are unique, Vladimir says otherwise. Named for a Soviet mathematician, the Levenshtein Distance between two words is the number of single-character edits required to change one word into the other. For instance to make "kitten" into "sitting" substitute "s" for "k", "i" for "e" and add a "g". That's' a score of 3, and to data scientists (and hackers) it means those two words are practically the same. And an analysis of my passwords finds lots of those close cousins.

Then there's the unpronounceable ZXCVBN score. It assigns a number to passwords based on how guessable they are. And since humans generally pick patterns they can remember, and therefore easy to predict, it's easy for a computer to do the same and figure them out. Think about how your phone prefills your Google search, or the next word when you are writing an email. Same idea here: a score of two or less means it's easy to suss out, as it would take less than a million guesses to nail it. That's a walk in the park for a computer. And yup, I'm guilty of that as well.

Put it all together and you get my middling score of 72. As I said, worse than some but certainly better than others, like those whose passwords routinely make the list of the most common ones. In 2023, number one was 123456, with 123456789 close behind. Rounding out the top five were querty, password and 12345. Is it any wonder that estimates of a cyberattack every 44 seconds leads to more than 800,000 people being hacked a year? 

But as the old saying goes, you don't have to be faster than the bear chasing you, just faster than the person you're running next to. And so if you make it harder or more time-consuming to be broken, the thieves will give up and move on to easier prey. So I guess I will go back to the vault and see if I can add a few special characters here, pick a strange combination there. It might be the only time in my life where my intentional misspellings rate an "A."

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Marc Wollin of Bedford thought he was more secure. Guess not. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Maestro Matt

While it's more than you can count on one hand or two, the fraternity of individuals who have conducted at Carnegie Hall is relatively small. As one of the most famous musical venues in the world, only the best get to perform there. Fewer still get step to the podium and command those arrayed before them.

While Matt Muller studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and plays drums, he built his career on the other side of the curtain. Starting off in North London, he learned the ropes backstage, eventually becoming a Stage Manager. His skills have taken him to numerous theatres and studios, including BBC dramas with such notables as Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Ralph Feinnes. He also has traveled the world managing various theatrical tours, and has worked business conferences where he helped shepherd CEO's and rock stars around the stage.

Still, all of that is decidedly out of public view. He did have one brush with fame, but it was due not to his talents but his daughter's. Mae Muller is a singer songwriter on the pop music scene, racking up top 40 hits as well as being selected as the UK entry in the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest. Earlier this year, she was playing Kentish Town Forum in North London. As she told the crowd, her dad was her biggest supporter and fan, and she wanted to pay him back just a little for his belief in her. So she invited him on stage to play drums with the band, a one song gig for him in front of an adoring crowd.

Still, that was a supporting roll, and while that venue is well known, it hardly carries the gravitas of Carnegie Hall. That's not to say that Matt isn't familiar with world class venues. For the last 7 years he has served as stage manager for the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras. This set of ensembles is made up of top-flight musicians specializing in historically inspired projects across a variety of repertoires, including sacred music, semi-staged operas and chamber works.

This year they had performances at top opera houses and halls in La Cote St Andre, Salzburg, Versailles, Berlin and London, after which they embarked on a North American tour. That excursion took them to Chicago, Ottawa, Princeton and New York City, with a performance at Carnegie. As always, Matt was charged with getting the ensemble's orchestra and singers set up and staged for rehearsals, then managing their performance from backstage.

The New York leg of the tour corresponded with his wife Caroline's birthday, but she was home in England. On that day Associate Conductor Dinis Sousa was putting the group through its paces, rehearsing them for the evening. The UK-based Portuguese conductor has the kind of pedigree you expect of someone on a stage of this magnitude. In addition to the Monteverdi ensembles, he has worked with other esteemed orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra and the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Being a valued and well-known member of the team, Matt thought he might call in a small favor. He went to Maestro Sousa, pointed out the significance of the date, and asked if perhaps the ensemble might sing "Happy Birthday" to his wife as a surprise while he recorded it to play for her when he got home. The maestro went one better: he asked if Matt wanted to conduct it. As Matt put it, "Er, conduct the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists at Carnegie Hall in New York? Hold my beer." 

Matt took the baton and stepped to the podium. With a flourish befitting Bernstein or Toscanini, he led the orchestra and choir in a spirited performance of the classic. In pics of his debut that a friend took you can't help but see the twinkle in his eye as he waves his arms for all he is worth, performing perhaps the finest rendition of the classic ever heard on the Carnegie Hall stage.

There's an old joke about the guy at the circus who sweeps up after the elephants. A spectator notes what a horrible job it is, and asks why doesn't he quit. "What?" he says. "And give up show business?" Matt's job backstage is far from pachyderm cleanup. But now he can add a new title beyond the supporting ones of stage and production manager to his show business resume: Maestro.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves being backstage. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Music From the Machine

The ghost in the machine of the moment is artificial intelligence, most notably as it is applied to text to create human sounding responses. Best exemplified by ChatGPT, the idea is that computers sift through millions of samples of man-made writings and learn to mimic it when prompted. Ask the system how to build a bench or an itinerary for a vacation in Mexico, and rather than get a list of websites you get a dissertation that seems as though it came from a carpenter or a world traveler.

While the initial efforts were focused on words, it didn't take long for developers to widen their focus. The next iteration involved pictures. It was the same idea: scour the internet for images of anything and everything, then use those examples to create new images that mimic real ones. So type "dog with a bone on Mars in the style of Dali" into DreamStudio or Midjourney, and you'll get a picture that looks as if Salvatore was taking his pooch for a walk on the red planet.

These image generators are also why the alarm bells are ringing over the creation of so called "deepfakes." While you can easily type in "picture of fruit floating in water in the style of Picasso" it's just as easy to enter "picture of Joe Biden at a bar doing shots as if taken by a paparazzi."  At this point the result might not be perfect or fool anyone, but as the systems get better it will be harder and harder to tell the fakes from the real.

The latest frontier is with sound. We're already seeing it with voice samples: in New York City they're using artificial intelligence to reach city residents through robocalls in a number of languages. But it's not just a random foreign speaker. They took Mayor Eric Adams' voice, sampled it and recreated it with him speaking in different tongues. So depending on your location in the five boros you might hear Hizzoner in Spanish, Yiddish or Mandarin, none which he actually speaks.

On the melodic side they are using the same approach as ChatGPT, just with music. The developers set their systems to scrape millions and millions of samples of songs available online, from classical to jazz, from pop to rock, from rap to country. They deliberately do not associate the songs with groups or artists for copyright reasons, but rather with a specific genre. And once they have that database, the building begins.

The process is the same as with pictures or text: describe some kind of music, press a button, and sit back to watch the machines build you a riff. Type "meditative song, calming and soothing, with flutes and guitars" into Google's MusicLM program. The computer thinks for a bit, and out comes a 20 second or so track that sounds like it could be from a group like We Dream of Eden or Phil France. Or try "up-tempo jazz that you can dance to in a smooth style" and out comes a Kenny G-esque sample. 

At this point the tracks sound artificial and half formed. But it's important to understand that what you are hearing are not samples of music that fit your description, but rather newly composed tunes never played nor heard by anyone anywhere. It's only a matter of time before the programs improve to the point that when you type in "danceable power pop that has positive vibe as if sung by a former Disney princess" what comes out sounds like the backing track to a Demi Lovato top ten hit.

If you're counting, that's words, pictures and sound that can be created by computers and passed off convincingly as crafted by flesh and blood humans. That leaves touch, smell and taste as the last frontiers for machine generated senses. One wonders if in some garage somewhere there is a tech toying around with his computer connected not to a keyboard, brush or instrument, but to a refrigerator and an oven, and typing in "hot food that blends tomatoes, cheese and spices in an irresistible package similar to but not as greasy as pizza." I bet we'll be eating the result before the end of the decade.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford has tried creating computer columns, photos and songs. None are that good. Yet. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Jumping the Croc

Up until 2007, if you wanted to listen to music you plugged your headphones into an MP3 player. If you wanted to reach someone you called their flip phone. And if you wanted to look for a flight you waited until you got to your desk and pulled up a Yahoo! Travel search page. It took the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple to smoosh all those capabilities and more into a single device that you could not only carry in your pocket, but looked good to boot. And the world has not been the same since.

Combining two or more things successfully into a new winning pairing is tough, though easier in some fields than others. With food there are multiple examples: spaghetti and meatballs, rum and Coke, chocolate and peanut butter. Some twofers are outside of the mainstream but still have found a following, like olive oil ice cream, or chicken and waffles. And still others try for a toehold but never really land. Some say the combination of Pepsi and milk or "Pilk" tastes like a melted ice cream float. Others say it just tastes like, well, pilk.

The one other area where that kind of invention works is fashion. In fact, the very essence of that field is to take existing garments and styles and combine them in new and interesting ways. As with edibles, there are some examples which might have seemed revolutionary at first but now are as classic as a blazer. Witness the whole athleisure trend, whereby items worn for sports have been retailored and restyled to be donned every day in almost every situation. Or hybrids such as the shacket (jacket and shirt), jeggings (jeans and leggings) or the relatively new coatigan (coat and cardigan) have each found a following. In each case two disparate items or looks were bolted onto one another, run through a blender and emerged as a distinctly unique item, at first scorned and derided, and later accepted as part of the fashion canon.

Occasional individual brands try and do the same thing, taking their signature attributes and grafting them onto line extensions. Ugg used to be a generic term for a rough looking sheepskin boot from Australia before it became a global footwear powerhouse. Not content to rest on its cushy wintertime soles, there are now Ugg slippers and sandals in various materials, heights and styles. The same goes for Burberry or Coach. While their origin was in a very specific item, now you can get that name and look on a not just a scarf or handbag, but on a hat or pair of kicks, neither of which leaves any doubt as to its original pedigree.

And then there's Crocs. Founded in 2002 as a floatable shoe for water-based activities, the brand has grown to become a consumer darling. These days you can get the classic clog-styled closed-cell foam shoe in a myriad of colors and variations. There's the open-toed sandal version like the Mega Crush, or a wedge like the Brooklyn Tortoise. Each tweaks the original design while retaining the basic anatomy of the brand to give you footwear more appropriate for other activities.

But in what might be a Croc too far comes a special release as part of the company's "Croctober" promotion. While there are boot versions of the original, they are shorties which seem like they might make sense on a rainy day. Not so much for this latest frankenfootie. For the low price of $120 you can purchase the limited edition Classic Crocs Cowboy Boot, which "features a signature Crocskin texture, metallic disco desert embroidery details, and a spinning spur on the back so you can really kick up some dirt." One reviewer described them as "love child of John Wayne and the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. They're so confused about their identity that they've become the fashion equivalent of an existential crisis."

In a 1977 episode of the sitcom "Happy Days," the Fonz jumps over a live shark on water skis. It was taken as a sign that the series was trying too hard to attract attention, a condition thereafter referred to as "jumping the shark." Has the shoe company tried a little too hard and jumped the Croc? Your call, but perhaps other footwear is in order if you are going to Texas.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford does not own any pair of Crocs. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.