BozoCrack MD5 Password Hash Cracker

BozoCrack is a depressingly effective MD5 password hash cracker with almost zero CPU/GPU load. Instead of rainbow tables, dictionaries, or brute force, BozoCrack simply finds the plaintext password … via Google. Specifically, it Googles the MD5 hash and hopes the plaintext appears somewhere on the first page of results. It works way better than it …

On Gowalla, Facebook, Instagram, Path, and Storytelling

I was meaning to write a blogpost on Gowalla 4. About how I used it less than before. But also about that when I use it (which I still do from time to time), I use it in a more engaged way. In the blogpost on Path 2, I was going to state that “Path …

The Instagram Server Stack

This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year. What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens …

Sydnex Matrix Locations

I went to Sydney, followed the trail of filming locations for The Matrix, and attempted to recreate shots from the film. My mind just exploded knowing that I actually was there about two years ago, residing in The Radisson, just around the corner of the Phone Booth Location. Created with Map Tales

Getting Started with Sass

Great new article on A List Apart introducing on to Sass. While browsers aren’t ready for a new CSS, Catlin and Weizenbaum (the authors of SASS, ed.) realized they could go ahead and design a new style sheet syntax with features to help make their increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage, then use …