Month: August 2018

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George Mikan

NOT George Mikan.

On this day in 1949, after a three-year battle to win both players and fans, the rival Basketball Association of America (BAA) and National Basketball League (NBL) merge to form the National Basketball Association (NBA).
The BAA incorporated in 1946, challenging the hegemony of the nine-year old NBL. The BAA established itself in bigger cities than the NBL, which existed only in small Midwestern cities like Fort Wayne, Sheboygan and Akron. While the NBL held its games in small gymnasiums, the upstart BAA played its games in large major-market arenas such as the Boston Garden and New York City’s Madison Square Garden. By the 1948-49 season, the BAA had begun to attract some of the country’s best players, and four NBL franchises  – Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Rochester – moved to the BAA, bringing their star players with them. George Mikan, the biggest attraction in either league who by himself could virtually assure a team’s success, defected to the new league with the Minneapolis Lakers.
 

On August 3, 1949, representatives from the two leagues met at the BAA offices in New York’s Empire State Building to finalize the merger. Maurice Podoloff, head of the BAA since its inception, was elected head of the new league. The new NBA was made up of 17 teams that represented both small towns and large cities across the country. Through the 1950s, though, the number of teams dwindled, along with fan support, and by the 1954-55 season, only eight teams remained. That year, the league transformed the game with the creation of the 24-second clock, making play faster-paced and more fun to watch. Fans returned, and the league, now financially solvent, expanded throughout the 1960s and 70s. Today, the NBA has 30 franchises and attracts players and millions of fans from countries around the world.

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Security

Talking about password security is a guaranteed crowd-snoozer, but hear me out. The hard reality is password security is extremely important.

Illustrated below are a few ways account passwords can be compromised:

  1. Someone you know is deliberately trying to cause you harm.
    There are many people who might want to take a peek into someone’s personal life. If these people know them well, they might be able to guess their email password and use password recovery options to access their other accounts.
  2. You become the victim of a brute-force attack.
    Whether a hacker attempts to access a group of user accounts or just one person, brute-force attacks are the go-to strategy for cracking passwords. These attacks work by systematically checking all possible passphrases until the correct one is found. If the hacker already has an idea of the guidelines used to create the password, this process becomes even easier to execute.
  3. There’s data breaches.
    Every few months, it seems another huge company reports a hacking resulting in the compromising of millions of accounts. Data breaches happen more often than reported on the news.

What can you do?

Although data breaches are out of your control, it’s still imperative to create passwords that can withstand brute-force attacks and relentless frenemies. Avoiding both types of attacks is dependent on the complexity of your password.

You think a password similar to yours is un-hackable?  This test will show how long will it take for a computer to crack a password similar to yours. This is a fun little exercise. Try it. VERY IMPORTANT: Please do not use your actual password, but rather, something similar.

https://howsecureismypassword.net/