It’s been rumored for quite some time now, here in Cyprus, but as they say, it ain’t true ’til the fat lady sings, pigs can fly, etc … you catch my drift, but even then it might not happen, cause guess what, we live in CYPRUS.

Seriously now back to the subject, considering the fact that something expected takes forever to materialize, the unreasonable long wait seems to just have shortened, in respect of ADSL speeds in Cyprus…

I am talking about the image below from my B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ which briefly insinuates that CyTA has allocated the folowing bandwidth on my account and i should be getting download speeds of 2368kbps and an upload speed of 448kbps, but i am currently NOT (CyTA seems to restrict the download speed to 1mbit).

I couldn’t really understand why everything was is kept hash-hash, till i had some conversations with people in the market, who made it all crystal clear to me.

Still wandering why Cyprus is still in the stone-age of ADSL speeds when our providers market a 2mbit download speed of as being “Speedy Gonzales”, where the rest of the world moves with 24mbit speeds having 2mbit as a bare minimum.

At first there was GOD only CyTA, providing all ADSL services, *monopoly abuse* but who cared…

As ADSL became more and more widespread, clientele became bigger CyTA did nothing to keep up, thus providing a really lousy service to the clients. Then people began changing internet service providers, -who leased CyTA lines-, promising better services, which somwhat reduced CyTA’s server load. Still nobody cared about CyTA’s *monopoly abuse*.

Then all of a sudden Cyprus became an EU member, and as such all EU member companies have to abide the EU regulations, and now somebody cares about *monopoly abuse* … did anybody ask them to ? come again ?

So, now CyTA has make room for the new market entrants in order to avoid any fines and penalties from the EU. CyTA therefore can NOT currently reduce prices and can NOT offer better services than its competitors, until it loses a major portion of its clientele to its competitors in order to favour fair competition.

In the end the ones in loss is the internet community that may not enjoy speeds and prices comparable to other countries.

Speculators though say, that from September 2008, CyTA clients may enjoy further reductions in prices and better services offered including increased ADSL speeds.

Only time will tell… if my patience doesn’t run out till then…

i sure thought so, until i decided to google for a password checker and rate my passwords. after all, i’m still human and can’t recall more than two passwords at a specific time, probably you fit in the same scheme as well . i hate it that at work i have five different sets of usernames and passwords that i have to use two or three every day just to access “my” personal computer and a couple of others on special occasions.

in any case, for home use i too have two sets of passwords, my standard one (shorter) and a more “secure” password (longer), i thought.

i’ve been using them for so long with out ever considering the strength of the passwords as after all they are a bunch of random key strokes.

now i have decided it’s time to strengthen my security by revising both my passwords, difficult part is remembering all the places i’ve used them

so back to the matter in hand, google has found some good tools in order to test your password strenght. after all there is no patented procedure to test one’s password strength so i decided to run them on all available tools.

to my disappointment and surprise both my passwords were rated weak and medium, with all password checkers, which is really unacceptable for my standards, so this post ends here, you know what i’ll be doing for the time being, and if i don’t post here ever again, you know what that means -better write that new password down somewhere-, *oups*…

below, you can find links to the password checkers i’ve used…

• Microsoft Password Checker
• Password Meter
• Security Stats

more reading at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx where microsoft has put together a really nice article for a change, on how to create passwords, dos and don’ts, etc…