Just about every Windows program prompts a user to select a file for some purpose, such as through the Open File dialog window:   I’ll call this kind of window “Opie” for the rest of this article.  Occasionally, a program will prompt a user not for a file, but for a folder.  In such cases [...]

(Caution: Amateur security research ahead.  Using it in a live system is not recommendable.) I recently read “How to Safely Store a Password”, an article by Coda Hale. For years I’ve thought that salting and hashing passwords with MD5 or SHA-1 prior to storage was sufficient to thwart password-cracking efforts (in cases where the user-account [...]