Triage

 

What do you do when a 16 year old laptop shows signs of loosing critical functions?

I'm not talking about the little things like:

The SD card reader not working. - The contacts in that thing wore out years ago and I've got a workaround for it.

The battery has worn out so bad I can only unplug it from shore power for about 15 minutes. - Hasn't been that much of a hassle since the laptop spends 99% of its time sitting on my desk out in the barn whereI can keep it plugged into shore power.

The finish is flaking off, and now the case itself is getting worn away from countless hours of sweaty palms. Sweaty because, in case you didn't notice, the laptop lives out in the un-airconditioned barn where it can get a little warm in the Texas summer. - Other than little black flakes stuck to the heel of my hand, no big deal.

Support for Windows 7 ended in 2020. - Actually a relief. If it ain't broke just leave me the fuck alone with your damn updates!

Or the fact that the screen has two horizontal rows of dead pixels (just below the password box), - I'm just carefull to not fold the screen down anymore in case that makes it worse.

All minor little things I can live with.

But now a more critical issue has popped up. The keyboard is failing.

At first it wasn't too bad. Occasionally I would have to re-enter a password with 'view password' turned on, or go back and re-input a value in a spreadsheet cell.

I eventually learned to use the keypad to enter numbers rather than the top row which seemed especially bad. But that only helped for just so long as things gradually got worse.

I have one particular password that is 17 characters long, about typical for me since I was trained to be very security conscious. But on top of that it's a double-entry password setup which requires me to input the password correctly twice before encrypting the backup. To make it even more interesting, there's no 'show password' option so, while I can see asterisks popping up with successful keystrokes, I can't tell if the keystroke was properly interpreted, which was now a new issue with my old, abused, and decrepit keyboard. I kept count recently and it took eight trys, 16 entries, to successfully encrypt the backup.

--- OK, time for one of my password rants here. (I have several tants in my password/security box tucked up on the top shelf of the closet, but today am only pulling out one and dusting it off.)

Security policies are always harping on and on about using a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters with numbers and special characters thrown in, all in an effort to confound password crackers.

That's just bullshit. Well, it's at least a little bit bullshit. The major exception to bullshitedness would be if you use proper words or proper nouns as a password - which you shouldn't be doing anyway since the English Wiktionary has all those words and many of the proper nouns in its 1.5 million entries. All of which are in convienent digital form which makes it easy to load the whole damn thing into a password cracker program. From there, depending on the platform it's running on, the craker can whip through the whole thing in minutes when testing a password - typicly one of the first things a cracker tries. In that case throwing in a special character or unusual capitalization will prevent the cracker from successfully using its initial library of words and common passwords like 1234 and password to crack the password before you can even blink. A special character or two will force the cracker to start using the brute-force algorithm which takes longer.

But my original point is, the cracker's algorithm already has to use all 94 posible keyboard characters and gives each one equal weight. Makes no difference if my password is grixos or gR8*0$, the cracker will take about the same amount of time to work either one of them out.

A more confounding strategy against crackers is password length. For example, using a sampling of all 94 posible keyboard characters, which is exactly what the cracker does by default, a 1 character password has 94 posibilities that must be checked, a 2 character password has 8836 posibilities and a 4 character password has over 78 million posible unique combinations. It's a logarithmic function, 94 to the power of (character count).

78 million sounds like a lot but a mediocre computer can run through that in minutes, a fast computer in seconds.

At 16 characters, the current recomended minimum length for a secure password, the posible combinations jump to just over 37 nonillion, thats 37 followed by 30 zeros. (I have one particularly sensitive password that is 23 characters long which is a little more than 24 tredecillion - 24 followed by 42 zeros - posible combinations. Yes, it can be cracked but would take a huge amount of computer resources and time, so would be extremely expensive and not worth the bother because there's lots of easier passwords to crack. Thieves will choose the unlocked car over my locked car with security system warning light flashing in the windshield most every time.)

So the cracker doesn't know that I'm not using any numbers or special characters in my 16 character password and still has to assume all 94 posible characters in each of the 16 slots.

BTW How the hell can someone memorize a 23 character password?!

My method for creating secure yet memorizable passwords is not that hard. I just take a phrase that means something to me, but obviously avoid commonly known things like Hamlet's 'to be' soliloquy, and build my password out of the first letters of each word. An example I used to use when teaching this stuff was GutbocfueS,awat0 It's a 16 character password that appears to be unmemorizable gibberish until you type it in while chanting (in your head of course, not out loud) 'Grandmother used to bake oatmeal cookies for us every Saturday and we ate them outside'. Capitalizing Grandmother and Saturday is a no-brainer and changing the final 'o' to a zero is pretty natural. Throw in a special character, the comma, at a natural if not gramaticly correct spot, and you have a password that not only hits all the security cryteria, but you can remember it without having to write the damn thing down on a sticky-note tucked under your keyboard.

As for "guessing" passwords like you see all to often on TV, it's usually not quite that easy, but does happen because people seem to think they're being clever using a significant date - most of which are public record, or a dog's name - which is plastered out there on social media somewhere.

I could go on here but - - - well - - - nope, nope, I'm not a certified cyber-security specialist, at least not any more, so I'm done.

--- Back to the triage.

At this point of fail-age (that increasingly dodgy keyboard) any normal person would wipe the laptop - not just delete files but overwrite everything - (in my case all data actually lives on encrypted USB sticks, not on the internal drive, so wiping consists of removing the sticks, which also activates the encryption), scrap it, and Amazon a new one.

But my laptop has some irreplaceable features. Some things I would have to pay a licensing fee to replace. Some which can not be replaced, and some which can now only be licenced via a bank-account-sucking subscription and are only accessable online, which is not an option at our internet-less house.

Things like Sketchup Make 2017. A free, offline, 3D cad program that's no longer available because a cloud-based subscription service has replaced it.

Delorme Topo mapping system which doesn't exist anymore since Garmen bought them out and scrapped all the Delorme electronic products.

Adobe Photoshops Elements which came with a camera I bought decades ago.

And Microsoft Office which is perpetually licenced on this particular laptop as a home-use version through my former job. I haven't used Project, Power Point, or Outlook since I retired, and haven't used Word all that much lately, but I use the crap out of Excell.

Yes, I can get a new basic laptop for $500 to $800 dollars. MS Home Office, which includes Excell, for a one time payment of one to two hundred dollars depending on the version. There are alternative free off-line 3D cad programs out there if I'm willing to deal with the learning curve. I can get a fresh Photoshop Elements license for $100 every three years. And do I really need a mapping program on my laptop anymore when I already have 3 or 4 different ones on my phone?

It's a given that one day I'll have to bite the bullet and do something like that,

but for now, for less than $12, I Amazoned a generic USB keyboard, sat it right on top of the laptop's failing keyboard, plugged it, and that quick had a fully functional keyboard again.

The USB hub I bought with it so I didn't have to lose one of the laptop's 3 onboard USB ports to the keyboard, one of which is permanently occupied by a mouse dongle because this old laptop has no bluetooth capability, cost me a couple dollars more than the keyboard!

So, back in action - at least until the next failure.