4.05.2010

Introducing Plexidor Electronic Access Control for your Dog!

Access Control is evolving all the time.  Situations in which access control can evolve to are limited only by one's imagination. That said, did you know that there’s access control option for your pets?

Yes, gone are the days where one worries about the unwanted entry of stray dogs, neighborhood cats, racoons, or any such pesky varmint.  Pet owners can find relief knowing that RFID tags are available for pet collars giving access to enter or exit the house when the pet door is equipped with electronic access control.  You are able to control which pet(s) can go outside and which cannot.

Love your pet? Can you hold it for 9 hours? The next time you have to “go” in the middle of the night, think about your pet – and the Plexidor® Performance Pet Doors. Sure, pets are different from people. People have flush toilets, pets don’t. Pets just have to wait until morning.

But if you forget, or make your pet wait too long, you know what comes next: Yup, the clean-up.

So, for the last 22 years, Plexidor® has been crusading for pets’ rights to come and go as they please. It’s actually a 2-in-1 crusade because pet owners have rights too…such as the right NOT to be a 24-hour-a-day doorman, the right NOT to live with spotted carpeting, and the right NOT to have to refinish scratched doors, to name just a few.

Because of this crusade Plexidor® has been designing and manufacturing the Performance Pet Door line. The Plexidors® come in sizes ranging from cat to great dane. They work in any kind of door or wall. All Plexidors® have heavy durable aluminum frames that can be secured and locked. White and bronze frames are baked on for strength and durability. And the door panels are made of insulated high impact acrylic to help keep your home warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Call us or visit our website and join the crusade. Order a Plexidor® pet door today. You and your pet will be happier.

  • High impact acrylic panels, also used in small aircraft windshields.
  • These colors do not run. Plexidor® pet doors are not painted, they use a baked on finish.
  • Dogs chew through plastic and bend thin aluminum frames. These are thick, heavy aluminum.
  • Magnets are not effective “keys” and are not used with Plexidor® pet doors.
  • The electronic door has 1000s of key codes.

Plexidor® Electronic Doors

Secure – Interior stainless steel locking bar, thousands of key codes. Opens only for your pets. Tough shatter resistant panel. Heavy, thick aluminum frames that won’t bend. Won’t interfere with home security system.

Energy Efficient – No gaps for air filtration, saves you money.

Pet/Child Safe – Panel won’t close when obstructed. Total control up and down. No pinched tails. No pinched fingers.

Dependable – Runs on household current. Collar key is waterproof and does not need batteries. Key fastens securely to collar and won’t fall off. Interior mounted motor won’t freeze up in cold.

Durable – Steel and hardened aluminum frame with thick acrylic closing panel. Wall units include aluminum tunnel pieces and stainless steel mounting hardware for years of service. No unsightly rust streaks on your home.

Easy to Use – One button programming to add or change collar codes quickly and simply. Collar key snaps on easily and stays on. Comes complete with pet door, exterior trim, stainless steel hardware, 2 collar keys, power supply and 15ft cord.


The key is a micro RFID chip weighing only 0.4 oz.

Plexidor® collar keys are:
  • Waterproof
  • Rugged
  • Battery free
  • Shock proof
  • Won’t fall off
  • Works with underground fencing
  • Have 1000s of key codes

How it works: Plexidor® Electronic “reads” the key code and opens only for your pet. Panel unlocks and slides up like a mini garage door. The main frame has a low profile of just 1 5/8” in thickness. Door plugs into household outlet or can be hardwired.

Order a Plexidor® today and say goodbye to…
  • Messy littler trays
  • Scratched doors
  • Wasted energy
  • Awkward, noisy, chewed flaps
  • Ruined carpets and drapes

Plexidor® Pet Doors Provide
  • Peace and quiet
  • Undisturbed sleep & TV
  • Freedom from worry about letting your pet out

Plexidors® are
  • A carpet saver
  • A money saver
  • An energy saver

4.01.2010

How I'd Hack Your Weak Passwords.

 source: One Man's Blog.


If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it? 

Let’s see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.
  1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
  2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
  3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
  4. “password”
  5. Your city, or college, football team name.
  6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
  7. “god”
  8. “letmein”
  9. “money”
  10. “love”
Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…

Hackers, and I’m not talking about the ethical kind, have developed a whole range of tools to get at your personal data. And the main impediment standing between your information remaining safe, or leaking out, is the password you choose. (Ironically, the best protection people have is usually the one they take least seriously.) 

One of the simplest ways to gain access to your information is through the use of a Brute Force Attack. This is accomplished when a hacker uses a specially written piece of software to attempt to log into a site using your credentials. Insecure.org has a list of the Top 10 FREE Password Crackers right here.

So, how would one use this process to actually breach your personal security? Simple. Follow my logic:
  • You probably use the same password for lots of stuff right?
  • Some sites you access such as your Bank or work VPN probably have pretty decent security, so I’m not going to attack them.
  • However, other sites like the Hallmark e-mail greeting cards site, an online forum you frequent, or an e-commerce site you’ve shopped at might not be as well prepared. So those are the ones I’d work on.
  • So, all we have to do now is unleash Brutus, wwwhack, or THC Hydra on their server with instructions to try say 10,000 (or 100,000 – whatever makes you happy) different usernames and passwords as fast as possible.
  • Once we’ve got several login+password pairings we can then go back and test them on targeted sites.
  • But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)
And how fast could this be done? Well, that depends on three main things, the length and complexity of your password, the speed of the hacker’s computer, and the speed of the hacker’s Internet connection.
Assuming the hacker has a reasonably fast connection and PC here is an estimate of the amount of time it would take to generate every possible combination of passwords for a given number of characters. After generating the list it’s just a matter of time before the computer runs through all the possibilities – or gets shut down trying.

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

Password Length All Characters Only Lowercase
3 characters
4 characters
5 characters
6 characters
7 characters
8 characters
9 characters
10 characters
11 characters
12 characters
13 characters
14 characters
0.86 seconds
1.36 minutes
2.15 hours
8.51 days
2.21 years
2.10 centuries
20 millennia
1,899 millennia
180,365 millennia
17,184,705 millennia
1,627,797,068 millennia
154,640,721,434 millennia
0.02 seconds
.046 seconds
11.9 seconds
5.15 minutes
2.23 hours
2.42 days
2.07 months
4.48 years
1.16 centuries
3.03 millennia
78.7 millennia
2,046 millennia

Remember, these are just for an average computer, and these assume you aren’t using any word in the dictionary. If Google put their computer to work on it they’d finish about 1,000 times faster.

Now, I could go on for hours and hours more about all sorts of ways to compromise your security and generally make your life miserable – but 95% of those methods begin with compromising your weak password. So, why not just protect yourself from the start and sleep better at night?

Believe me, I understand the need to choose passwords that are memorable. But if you’re going to do that how about using something that no one is ever going to guess AND doesn’t contain any common word or phrase in it.


Here are some password tips:
  1. Randomly substitute numbers for letters that look similar. The letter ‘o’ becomes the number ‘0′, or even better an ‘@’ or ‘*’. (i.e. – m0d3ltf0rd… like modelTford)
  2. Randomly throw in capital letters (i.e. – Mod3lTF0rd)
  3. Think of something you were attached to when you were younger, but DON’T CHOOSE A PERSON’S NAME! Every name plus every word in the dictionary will fail under a simple brute force attack.
  4. Maybe a place you loved, or a specific car, an attraction from a vacation, or a favorite restaurant?
  5. You really need to have different username / password combinations for everything. Remember, the technique is to break into anything you access just to figure out your standard password, then compromise everything else. This doesn’t work if you don’t use the same password everywhere.
  6. Since it can be difficult to remember a ton of passwords, I recommend using Roboform for Windows users. It will store all of your passwords in an encrypted format and allow you to use just one master password to access all of them. It will also automatically fill in forms on Web pages, and you can even get versions that allow you to take your password list with you on your PDA, phone or a USB key. If you’d like to download it without having to navigate their web site here is the direct download link.
  7. Mac users can use 1Password. It is essentially the same thing as Roboform, except for Mac, and they even have an iPhone application so you can take them with you too.
  8. Once you’ve thought of a password, try Microsoft’s password strength tester to find out how secure it is.
By request I also created a short RoboForm Tutorial. Hope it helps…

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the passwords you think matter least actually matter most. For example, some people think that the password to their e-mail box isn’t important because “I don’t get anything sensitive there.” Well, that e-mail box is probably connected to your online banking account. If I can compromise it then I can log into the Bank’s Web site and tell it I’ve forgotten my password to have it e-mailed to me. Now, what were you saying about it not being important?

Often times people also reason that all of their passwords and logins are stored on their computer at home, which is save behind a router or firewall device. Of course, they’ve never bothered to change the default password on that device, so someone could drive up and park near the house, use a laptop to breach the wireless network and then try passwords from this list until they gain control of your network – after which time they will own you!

Now I realize that every day we encounter people who over-exaggerate points in order to move us to action, but trust me this is not one of those times. There are 50 other ways you can be compromised and punished for using weak passwords that I haven’t even mentioned.

I also realize that most people just don’t care about all this until it’s too late and they’ve learned a very hard lesson. But why don’t you do me, and yourself, a favor and take a little action to strengthen your passwords and let me know that all the time I spent on this article wasn’t completely in vain.
Please, be safe. It’s a jungle out there.