Amazon Password Weakness

Amazon apparently has/had a weakness when it came to storing older passwords that had not been changed in a while, and if your password was longer than eight characters, you could enter eight and then any random garbage and the system would log you in. If your account was vulnerable in this fashion, you could log in, change your password back to what it is, and you'll be OK.

I just tested my password, which is 14 characters long, and it was fine. I guess I created my account late enough that it was not affected.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/amazon-password-problem/

If you're sufficiently geeky to be interested in supercomputer performance, read on!

Supercomputers are now at the petaflop speed point, the current fastest is a Chinese rig that does 2.57. DARPA asked a study group what it would take to build an exaflop computer, and the basic answer is that it isn't really possible right now. Power requirements, excluding cooling for the rig, would require a nuke plant next door...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-supercomputers/0