We cannot really understand yet how much technology has changed our lives. Those of us in our forties or older have the advantage of having seen a shift from an essentially analogue world to a digital one. We have seen interpersonal communication move from a pipe dream to a daily, second-by-second reality.

Today’s yoof have grown up in a world of Facebook, instant email, IM, smartphones in their pocket. They cannot function without an IP connection. It is more important to them than food. It is the new era drug that each of us consume. They know no different.

Thus it is particularly sad to see what happens when it goes wrong. And two very lovely people’s lives get turned upside down. Go over to the Vexentricity blog and read how a dependency on technology has ripped a family apart. And ask yourself this: honestly, how close are you to that reality too? And is that somewhere you want to be, or feel you ought to be? Or even should be?

The news that Steve Jobs has resigned the position of CEO and that Tim Cook, the long term COO, is taking over the position, should come as no surprise to anyone following both Apple and Jobs. Steve Jobs has been battling cancer for many years. That he remained in the position of CEO for so long shows his love of the work, and the company he both built and then rebuilt upon his return in the 90s.

Although he doesn’t mention his health in his resignation letter, it’s the only possible reading of the first paragraph: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

As expected, the bottom feeders on the stock market have managed to have both a drop for Apple and a rise for other companies like Samsung. But that simply shows the inanity of their extreme short termism views, which compares with stark clarity to the exceptional long term view taken by Jobs.

Will Apple flounder with Jobs out of the limelight? No, I don’t believe so

He has been prepared to drive the company over a very long arc since his return. It was clear that battling Microsoft head-on would not allow Apple to win. So he took the even more clever route of redefining the problem. The shift to iPod, to iPhone and thence to iPad is one which the industry still does not comprehend, and whose importance will not be fully understood for another 20 years or more.

The move away from stark business computing to truly personal computing, centered around “my stuff” like photos, music, video, web, email, social networking, is more profound than the introduction of the original PC. And Apple has led the charge at every step.

Trouble ahead?

Will Apple flounder with Jobs out of the limelight? No, I don’t believe so. The reality is that Cook has been hugely influential for the past years anyway, and Jobs has built an exceptional leadership team. This has led the way in terms of design, online and physical retailing, negotiating with content providers, and a truly exceptional engineering and supply-chain management capability.

Of course, Jobs has been at the helm, steering the company forward by ensuring both the grand vision and micro attention to tiniest of details is not squandered or compromised. “Obsessive” is the word most often associated with him in this role. But I am certain that the teams and structures he has put in place are more than capable of following this through. After all, R&D and product development has not faltered in the past years despite Jobs’ ill health.

It is too early to write his obituary, which makes writing this seem rather strange, because I cannot believe he is stepping down for any reason other than health. He leaves behind a legacy, and a company that truly changed the world. His work is done.

I was pointed in the direction of a blog posting talking about the use of GPU processors to launch brute-force attacks on passwords. GPUs are extremely good at this sort of workload, and the price/performance ratio has changed dramatically over the past few years. What might have seemed impossible even 36 months ago is now perfectly do-able on your desktop computer.

In this report, the author takes a fairly standard Radeon 5770 graphics card (you’ll find it on our A-List under Value Graphics Card), and uses a free tool called ighashgpu to run the brute-force password cracking tools on the GPU. To provide a comparison point with the capabilities of a standard desktop CPU, he uses a tool called “Cain & Abel”.

The results are startling. Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of “fjR8n” can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second.

Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.

Is an IT manager really going to manage to get the CFO to log in using “fR4; $sYu 29 @QwmQz” without the combination ending up on a Post-it note in his wallet?

Now, I cannot imagine anyone managing to mandate a nine-character, mixed-case, random-character password on an organisation. But if you did, and you weren’t hanging from a tree by the end of the first working day, the CPU would take 43 years versus 48 days for the GPU.

He then went on to add in mixed symbols to create “F6&B is” (there is a space in there). CPU will take 75 days, GPU will take 7 hours.

What does this tell us? well, the stark reality is that even long and complex passwords are now toast. If you think you were being wise by forcing users to have randomisation in their passwords, then think again. It is utterly futile.

Yes, you can force your users to have a 15-character password consisting of random numbers and letters, and throw in punctuation as well. This is great as an idea, but we know that most users think that a password like “Barry1943Manilow” where 1943 was the year he was born, is complex and hard to remember. Is an IT manager really going to manage to get the CFO to log in using “fR4; $sYu 29 @QwmQz” without the combination ending up on a Post-it note in his wallet? Or stuck to the side of the screen? Because anything much less than this is going to be open to attack over the next few years.

A GPU of the type used by this chap is not unusual or high end. It is standard-issue stuff. Indeed, I have just sat through the AMD presentation here at Computex in Taiwan, and they made a big deal about putting GPU power into netbooks offering 500Gflops, without denting its 12-hour battery life. And that’s shipping within months.

All I can say is this: you have been warned. It is time to think long and hard about password security, and how you do your authentication. This has crept up on us in the background, and we really haven’t been paying attention. Nor has Microsoft, frankly, who should be having a whole raft of alternative, hardened solutions in place ready for its business customers to roll out.

What are the solutions? To be honest, I’m not sure. A combination of TPM, biometrics, passwords and maybe something else entirely new will be needed. But it’s clear that a complex password that users will actually accept for day-to-day authentication, and keep secret, might be history.

The news that Samsung is readying production of a 10.1in display for tablets, running at a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, is a game changer. This is 300dpi on a near A4-sized display device.

Without question, this changes the rules for display of information.

Now, who will bring this to market first? Will it be Samsung? Will Apple buy the entire production run for an HD iPad 2?

What is certain is that everything rotates around cost. And the cost is driven heavily by the yield of the production process. Without doubt, the initial yield will be poor, and thus volume will be low and price will be high, unless Samsung wants to absorb the costs.

300dpi on a tablet changes everything, and there is no going back

As the yield increases, the volume improves and the price falls. How that yield/cost/profit curve works will be a deadly secret held within Samsung, and in its negotiations with any third-party customers.

It’s a pity its not a Windows device — Microsoft, in conjunction with IBM, did a 300dpi desktop display panel almost a decade ago. It required four graphics card connections, and was considered a monster at the time. The price was stratospheric, and almost no-one bought one. But I saw it once, and was blown away by the display quality.

But be in no doubt — 300dpi on a tablet changes everything, and there is no going back.

So Microsoft is buying skype for $8bn. Whether that figure includes the $686m of debt that Skype has isn’t clear. What is clear is that this is a huge amount of money for a company that has a turnover of $859m and an operating loss of $7m.

What is staggering is that Microsoft has bought it. Skype would have been a great fit for Apple. A great fit for Facebook. But Microsoft? Hello?

When an acquisition like this is announced, we sit around stroking our beards pontificating about the “synergy”, the “good fit” and so forth.

Microsoft has a full infrastructure in place with MSN and Lync. It has the Lync services in place for the new Office 365 product. How on earth does Skype fit in here?

And then it all becomes clear. Microsoft is basically buying 600 million customer details. And Skype is a perfect fit for the online services division of Microsoft, which manages to haemorrhage money year after year. Skype is therefore the perfect acquisition.

StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

But when you go to read the Microsoft offer you find that the offer consists of:

1. “Webinars and seminars – we will build a programme to train 5,000 businesses”  - which sounds just like the free webinars and seminars Microsoft already provides.

2. “A free 90-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to help you manage your customer relationships and sales pipeline. Worth £370.” Excuse me? £370 of value in a 90-day trial of some Microsoft software? I can go to the Microsoft website and get a 30 day trial for free. Do it three times if you really need to. But claiming this is “worth £370″ is an insult to small businesses.

3. “A head-start on online advertising with Bing and Microsoft. Worth £30 + sign up for a free webinar.” So you get £30’s worth of free advertising on the Microsoft advertising engine. Gosh.

4. “A free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, the essential software suite for managing a small business,” for which, curiously, Microsoft attaches no value. Probably because it is a “free trial”.

So the reality is that Microsoft has not provided “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”. That, dear Microsoft, would be two full licences of Office 2010 for small business for free. Trialware and a free play with your advertising engine adds up to a great big zero.

Ah, the power of the accursed Twitter! A few minutes ago, @zensoftware tweeted that its Backup Assist Version 4 product was at end of life.

The BackupAssist website says: “Version 4 of BackupAssist was released in May 2007 and we have enjoyed providing you with support for this version over the past few years. We’ve made many improvements and additions to BackupAssist since then, including the release of BackupAssist v5 in October 2008.

“After releasing BackupAssist v6 last year, and adding even more functionality to the software, we decided that it was time to hang up the boots for version 4 in early 2011. While you can continue using BackupAssist v4, we will no longer be providing technical support for this version and you can no longer purchase upgrades for any of your version 4 licenses; you will instead need to purchase new BackupAssist v6 licenses at the standard price.”

I tweeted back, saying I thought this was a little draconian for a product that was launched only four years ago.

Within minutes, the company replied, saying “Fair comment. As a gesture, we’ll honour the std expired renewal price for customers who contact us quoting ref UKBAUPG4″. Which is better than a proverbial poke in the eye.

So if you have BackupAssist v4, maybe you should think about upgrading?

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough data rogering by the US Government.

It appears that some foreign nationals are up in arms about this.

Can I say “I told you so”? For over two years, I have been raising the question of the territoriality and legal framework of data held by US companies, especially when the data is held on US territory.

There are even considerations and worries about data held on EU-hosted servers owned by US corporations. As I reported a month or so ago, at least Bob Muglia, president of servers and tools at Microsoft, was honest enough to admit that Microsoft would hand over data to the US authorities if so instructed, because they would have no choice but to comply.

Frankly, I feel a lot happier about Microsoft’s cloud solution now in the light of knowing what would happen. Confusion and obfuscation has no place in this matter.

So you can imagine my reaction to another Very Well Known cloud vendor from America, with facilities in the UK, who, when asked by me to clarify their legal position on EU hosted data and attacks by US government, said: ”At this time we’re not able to comment on this question.”

When I followed up by asking: “To be clear, the CTO has no comment on whether the data of his customers would or would not be taken out of the EU against the wishes of his customers?”, I received the reply: “We cannot comment on this at this time.”

Now please answer me this question: is this a company that you feel comfortable doing business with?

So Microsoft has decided to kill off the Drive Extender technology in the next release of Windows Home Server, codenamed Vail (and the other concotions of the same basic recipe: Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, codenamed Aurora).

This was the one bit of cleverness in Windows Home Server that really appealed to the home user. Buy a four-bay server like the cute little HP Home Server, and add more discs when you needed more space.

The underlying drive manager tools just added the space into the pool for you, rather like a Drobo does. And you could mark important files and directories so they were put onto more than one spindle, just in case of drive failure. It was simple, it worked, and the users loved it.

For the 2011 version, Microsoft decided to rejig the technology and came up with the refreshed version called Drive Extender. Now, after a very embarrassing 24 hours — in which they claimed we really didn’t need it, indeed that we were calling on Microsoft to pull it out and junk it — they have had to admit that it didn’t work properly so it’s been junked.

The howls of protest are reverberating around the world.

I’ll dig into this more in my next column, but here’s a thought for the meantime. Microsoft, or rather the brilliant team led by David Cutler, came up with NTFS in 1991. Since then, just about every storage technology that Microsoft has tried to bring to market has failed.

Cairo’s Object File System never happened. Structured storage deconstruction to NTFS streams in NT 3.51 never made it to release. Drive M: in Exchange Server was canned because it was way too easy to break. The WinFS object file system promised for Vista. And now Drive Extender. Thats one attempt every five years, give or take.

I was chatting with one corporate IT director recently who lovingly stroked the floor to ceiling rackspace of his huge Storage Area Network. We were musing about Microsoft and file systems. He said “NTFS is very solid, but Microsoft doesn’t do storage. Not even slightly. And can’t innovate in the space either”.

Hard to disagree with his view, to be honest.

Shopping on the web is a wonderful thing. You can buy just about anything if you look. It’s easy to fill in the forms, hand over the credit card details, and wait for the courier to deliver the package.

Even better, you can put in a different delivery address and have things sent to family and friends. This is especially useful for birthday gifts.

So this morning, we decided to buy some driving lessons for my nephew who will be 17 in a few weeks. I went to the BSM website, chose a gift package of lessons, filled in the details of my home address, credit card and the address of his school where he is a boarder. The transaction completed with no problems, and I received a confirmation email, containing all the information.

Imagine my surprise, then, to have just received a phone call from BSM’s web department. Apparently its internal systems throw away the delivery address if it’s a gift, so it had no idea where to send the vouchers. I enquired whether this was normal procedure, and was assured that this was, indeed, the case – the driving school has to phone up customers to find out where to send gift package because some HTML Hairdresser has screwed up the coding. And no-one’s had the gumption to fix it yet.

I have one question – how does an organisation such as BSM stay in business if it employs people this stupid?