Yesterday, I bid farewell to the LastPass Password manager with whom I had a long association. A little over 10 years ago, I saw the writing on the wall and realized that I needed help with password management and nervously signed up with this new and up-and-coming password manager called LastPass. To encourage more users, LastPass offered a 5-year deal for $60. I signed up for this deal and was pleasantly surprised by what the tool could do. As it is with a lot of startups, the energy levels are high when starting out and new releases brought new functionality regularly. But that pace dropped off precipitously and in the last few years, they sort of sat on their laurels and the tool became passe and dated. To compound their problems, a series of hacks last year exposed their basic claim of security for your passwords. Unknown hackers managed to clone several password databases and then using state-of-the-art computers, they managed to crack user master passwords even those that were
Again, it has been several years since I have had the time to write another blog post. Life gets in the way. The kids are growing up too fast. Parents are growing old too fast. Different sorts of issues to face as you step through these phases in life. More on that in a later post. This post is dedicated to the humble men and women scientists of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Long ridiculed by the Western world for their ambitious goals (see NYT's cartoon picture depicting the Indian scientist as a farmer with a cow knocking on the door of the Elite Space Club). The immortal words of Sir Winston Churchill , "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" are very apt to describe what ISRO has been able to accomplish. The 1.4 Billion Indians are grateful to the ISRO for this achievement. We (as in most of the Indians settled here in the US) have no right to share the limelight with the men and women engineers of ISRO. These are hard-working, lower-middle-c