Cleaning and tidying

This morning I did some Korean learning, and processed a photo I took last night. Unfortunately the photo doesn't look great when viewed at 100% as I had to mess around with my other camera on the same tripod during the 'exposure', which created a bit of movement. My D200 ran through each of its fully charged batteries in about 10 minutes of exposure time last night, so it seems I am unable to do night photography with that camera now.

I could buy a new battery for it, but I expect a 'new' battery would actually be a few years old. Would it be any better than my current batteries? And I don't really use the D200 much now anyway.

I spent quite a bit of the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon trying to clean my camera sensors. My 5D2 seems to have a sensor that is impossible to clean. Eventually I managed to get it clean enough so there are just a couple of dust spots near the edge of the sensor. And they aren't really visible unless you look for them (or apply a strong curve tone).

My other cameras were all relatively dust free, so I didn't clean their sensors at all. No point in trying to clean them and risking them ending up with more dust spots.

After that I did some tidying and vacuuming.

On HFM Moley mentioned about Facebook doing something with passwords due to the Adobe hack, so I looked up what he was on about. I found this article on the BBC Website: Facebook protects users following Adobe hack attack. The article is a bit unclear as it states:

Hashing involves using an algorithm to convert a plaintext password into an unrecognisable string of characters. Utilising the tool means a service does not need to keep a record of the password in its original form.

Although the process is designed to be irreversible - meaning a hacker should not be able to reverse-engineer the technique to expose the credentials - it does have the same effect each time, meaning the same original entry would always result in the same hashed code.

Facebook took advantage of this to scan through its own records to see which of its users' hashed passwords matched those of Adobe's and had overlapping email addresses.

If Facebook was comparing hashed passwords from Adobe with the hashed passwords on their own system, that would indicate that both Facebook and Adobe were using the same hashing algorithm and not using any salt. That would be quite a security lapse on the parts of Facebook and Adobe. However, I don't think this is actually the case. I think the wording of the article is just a bit confusing, since earlier in the article it states:

It works by taking the Adobe passwords that third-party researchers had managed to unencrypt and running them through the "hashing" code used by Facebook to protect its own log-ins.