In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has expanded beyond a simple encyclopedia to establish a greater “Wikimedia movement” that few people see but benefit from in profound, novel ways. The extension of the crowdsourced knowledge effort to “media” has spawned a range of projects, from the multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons to collaborations with world class international museums to the creation of Wikidata, the world’s largest shared open access database.
Launched in 2012, Wikidata was designed to help Wikipedia structure 15 years worth of users’ text contributions into a database that allows for cross-referencing and linking to the outside world. By having precise technical descriptions of information in its database, Wikidata makes searching, filtering and joining collections of human knowledge possible on a massive scale. It has been so successful that Google cancelled its own similar project, Freebase, to throw its support to Wikidata. In its announcement, the search giant noted the superiority of the Wikimedia project as a “community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge.”
With Wikidata acting as a central database hub on the Internet, the possibilities for cultural and educational institutions are staggering. A project called “Mix’N’Match” is already underway to use Wikidata as a hub that links museum collections. Prominent cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian, British Museum and the Getty Research Institute are joining their individual databases to Wikidata, thereby creating the ultimate directory — what some have called, after Tolkien, “one database to bind them.”
Wikipedia just turned 15 years old. Will it survive 15 more?
Disruptive changes to business models will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years. Many of the major drivers of transformation currently affecting global industries are expected to have a significant impact on jobs, ranging from significant job creation to job displacement, and from heightened labour productivity to widening skills gaps. In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.1 In such a rapidly evolving employment landscape, the ability to anticipate and prepare for future skills requirements, job content and the aggregate effect on employment is increasingly critical for businesses, governments and individuals in order to fully seize the opportunities presented by these trends—and to mitigate undesirable outcomes.
The Future of Jobs Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
2016 World Economic Forum
“So what do you do?” It’s a question that most of us have asked – or been asked – at some point. We often use it as an easy way to start a conversation and to establish some common ground.
But what if people thought our jobs seemed incomprehensible? I think that’s exactly what would happen if we could talk to somebody from the early 19th century and try to explain what working life looks like in 2016. In the same way, we’d probably struggle to understand a regular day in the 22nd century.
While it took 100 years to connect 1 billion places, only 25 years were required to connect 5 billion people. Today, not only places and people are connected, but things too – in fact, we forecast 26 billion connected devices in 2020.
Today’s level of disruption may be unprecedented, but things will never move so slowly again.
What would a regular day in the 22nd century look like?
The Internet Trends 2015 report emphasized how communication via mobile messaging is fundamentally changing online communication and, importantly, is opening up a range of important opportunities and possibilities for the future. Use of mobile devices and online mobile communication have evolved rapidly, from text to images, to video, to including all of the above today. According to Meeker, communication via mobile messaging is now:
• “asynchronous yet instant”
• “expressive yet fast”
• “engaging yet user controlled”
• “casual yet professional”
• “easy yet productive”
• “personal yet mainstream”
• “mobile yet distributed”
• “instant yet secure”
• “real-time yet replayable”
• “current yet evergreen”
• “accessible yet global”
• “simple yet 24x7”50
These new forms of communication reveal how digital technologies are changing more widely, and are important trends to watch and understand in the future.
The Impact of Digital Content: Opportunities and Risks of Creating and Sharing Information Online
As Kevin Kelly more provocatively put it, “the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI”.
“Acquihire as a business model”
People say that data scientists are unicorns in short supply. The talent crunch in machine intelligence will make it look like we had a glut of data scientists. In the data field, many people had industry experience over the past decade. Most hardcore machine intelligence work has only been in academia. We won’t be able to grow this talent overnight.
The Current State of Machine Intelligence
Here is a 3 min video from the folks at Creative Commons that we should all be concerned with if we value the digital environment and the future of innovation.
Light up our global commons
We are proud to share with you Creative Commons 2016-2020 Organizational Strategy, reflecting over a year of intensive collaboration by CC’s global community. The insights and approaches contained within it have been influenced by hundreds of valuable discussions with our stakeholders, ranging from creators and open community leaders, to foundations and government officials.
This will be a transformative shift for Creative Commons — a new direction that is more focused and will have even greater impact.
This is well worth the view a 15 min video presentation by Ray Kurzweil - for anyone interested in change within the digital environment - a MUST VIEW
Ray Kurzweil: The Future of Intelligence - Nobel Week Dialogue 2015
In this talk, Kurzweil explores the history and trajectory of advances in computing and Information Technology to project how he believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) may enhance our natural biological intelligence in the future.
Kurzweil spoke at the Nobel Week Dialogue on December 9, 2015 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Nobel Week Dialogue is a free of charge, full-day event and part of the official Nobel Week programme. The event aims to stimulate discussion at the highest level on a topical science-related theme by bringing together Nobel Laureates, the world’s leading scientists and experts, key opinion leaders, policy makers and the general public, online as well as on site. By bridging science and society, it’s an opportunity to stimulate thinking, excite imagination and inspire greatness!
Here something from the World Economic Forum on the assessment of risks in the next year.
What are the top global risks for 2016?
From the environment to international security and the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 finds risks on the rise in 2016.
In this year’s annual survey, almost 750 experts assessed 29 separate global risks for both impact and likelihood over a 10-year time horizon. The risk with the greatest potential impact in 2016 was found to be a failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This is the first time since the report was published in 2006 that an environmental risk has topped the ranking. This year, it was considered to have greater potential damage than weapons of mass destruction (2nd), water crises (3rd), large-scale involuntary migration (4th) and severe energy price shock (5th).
Here’s the link to the Global Risks Report 2016
This is an very interesting but long (2 hours) video presentation on economics. He discusses some fascinating aspects of our economic system that is well worth the listen.
The Cure for Capitalism
Economist Richard Wolff explains exactly why the current economic system is failing us. But this isn't some stale economics lecture. He speaks with passion and humor, laying out what it will take to wrest power out of the boardrooms and back to the rank-and-file. Why isn't there democracy in the workplace? Why do executive bonuses keep going up, while labor wages keep going down? Can capitalism be fixed?
This is a long but excellent article on the current and potential future of Bitcoin. This is a MUST READ for anyone looking for a serious critique of Bitcoin - in fact one that proposes that Bitcoin is a failure.
The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of developers, and the talks I’ve given have led directly to the creation of several startups. I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.
From the start, I’ve always said the same thing: Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail. So don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose. I’ve said this in interviews, on stage at conferences, and over email. So have other well known developers like Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik.
But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.
This is a short article on the current state of Zappos a company that committed itself to transformation from traditional hierarchy to Holocracy.
The Zappos Exodus Continues After a Radical Management Experiment
Zappos, the online shoe retailer experimenting with the radical self-management system Holacracy, is continuing to hemorrhage employees.
In a post on the company’s website, Arun Rajan, the chief operating officer, said 18 percent of the company, or some 260 people, had left the company since March.
The exodus began after the chief executive, Tony Hsieh, announced that the company was going to adopt Holacracy, which is supposed to promote collaboration and abolish hierarchy. Anyone who did not accept the change could take a generous buyout, Mr. Hsieh said at the time. Within weeks, about 14 percent of the company, or 210 employees, had left the company, an Amazon subsidiary known for its playful corporate culture, convivial atmosphere and ample perks.
Diversity is a principle that we have no problem accepting now at least in theory - here is an 8 min video that should be inspiring not only about diversity but celebrating the wealth of people.
Skills Inc. Then & Now: Celebrating 50 Years
Since 1966, Skills Inc. has been dedicated to serving our community and enhancing the lives of individuals with disabilities by providing meaningful employment. The last 50 years have been an exciting time that included many advancements for civil rights, technology and aerospace. Through it, our organization has adapted to remain relevant, competitive and financially solvent.
During 2016, we look forward to celebrating with you our accomplishments, reflecting on our history and aspiring towards a brighter future. To our current and previous employees, customers and partners, we thank you for an incredible 50 years!
This is a 10 min read and is a great summary on the state of AI or as this author calls it Machine Intelligence. This info-graphic included in the article is very useful.
The Current State of Machine Intelligence
I spent the last three months learning about every artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data related startup I could find — my current list has 2,529 of them to be exact. Yes, I should find better things to do with my evenings and weekends but until then…
Why do this?
A few years ago, investors and startups were chasing “big data” (I helped put together a landscape on that industry). Now we’re seeing a similar explosion of companies calling themselves artificial intelligence, machine learning, or somesuch — collectively I call these “machine intelligence” (I’ll get into the definitions in a second). Our fund, Bloomberg Beta, which is focused on the future of work, has been investing in these approaches. I created this landscape to start to put startups into context. I’m a thesis-oriented investor and it’s much easier to identify crowded areas and see white space once the landscape has some sort of taxonomy.
Computers are learning to think, read, and write. They’re also picking up human sensory function, with the ability to see and hear (arguably to touch, taste, and smell, though those have been of a lesser focus). Machine intelligence technologies cut across a vast array of problem types (from classification and clustering to natural language processing and computer vision) and methods (from support vector machines to deep belief networks). All of these technologies are reflected on this landscape.
This is an interesting article with links discussing the development of the means to verify images used in news and social media. These sorts of technologies are vital tools to enables better 21st century literacies and informed citizens - perhaps something that can transparently be required by all major broadcast news media - including FOX.
Meet Verified Pixel: A ‘visual spellcheck’ for verifying images in news
The Knight Foundation-funded prototype aims to speed up verification by automating many of the manual checks in the process
It seems every major news story now brings with it a minefield of fake pictures for newsrooms to sort through, a minefield that grows ever bigger each year.
Now every time a big story breaks many of these images are re-used by people in the wrong context, whether that is to paint Syrian refugees as terrorists, mislead reports from Easter Ukraine or more generally mislead news organisations and the public.
Knowledge of verification skills is growing, but how can journalists keep up with the fakers and sort the wheat from the chaff quickly? A new prototype for news gathering and verification aims to help them do just that.
“The base assumption was how could we combine many known verification tests into one simplified workflow to help automate the process quickly,” said Sam Stewart, project lead of Verified Pixel, fresh out of its funding period from the Knight Foundation.
Along with Sam Dubberley, co-founder of Eyewitness Media Hub, and Douglas Arellanes, co-founder of media technology organisation Sourcefabric, Stewart spent a large part of 2015 developing the prototype. They invited users to experiment with the dashboard in the hope it will speed up the verification process and let anyone, no matter their experience, check images automatically.
“The idea is for a reliability of verification every time it comes into the newsroom,” Dubberley said.
“I sometimes call it a visual spellcheck,” said Stewart. “Everyone is running spellcheck because it’s built into the platform, but there could be a day where everyone is performing verification because it’s automated and very easy to do. This is our foray into attempting to get there.”
Verified Pixel conducts a number of checks on any new image added to its database: checking Google TinEye to see if and when the picture has appeared online before; scanning the image file for EXIF data to understand when, where and on what device it was captured; and running it through image forensics tool Izitru to see if the image has been altered.
Communication between human is complex - a non-controversial statement - it includes the power of frames and metaphor to structure how one reasons and collective tacit knowledge as the basis of fluency. This is an interesting article about a different research approach to the study of communication as opposed to language.
Will computers ever truly understand what we're saying?
Brain scans during communication game pinpoint areas where minds meet
If you think computers are quickly approaching true human communication, think again. Computers like Siri often get confused because they judge meaning by looking at a word's statistical regularity. This is unlike humans, for whom context is more important than the word or signal, according to a researcher who invented a communication game allowing only nonverbal cues, and used it to pinpoint regions of the brain where mutual understanding takes place.
From Apple's Siri to Honda's robot Asimo, machines seem to be getting better and better at communicating with humans.
But some neuroscientists caution that today's computers will never truly understand what we're saying because they do not take into account the context of a conversation the way people do.
Specifically, say University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow Arjen Stolk and his Dutch colleagues, machines don't develop a shared understanding of the people, place and situation -- often including a long social history -- that is key to human communication. Without such common ground, a computer cannot help but be confused.
"People tend to think of communication as an exchange of linguistic signs or gestures, forgetting that much of communication is about the social context, about who you are communicating with," Stolk said.
"Most cognitive neuroscientists focus on the signals themselves, on the words, gestures and their statistical relationships, ignoring the underlying conceptual ability that we use during communication and the flexibility of everyday life," he said. "Language is very helpful, but it is a tool for communication, it is not communication per se. By focusing on language, you may be focusing on the tool, not on the underlying mechanism, the cognitive architecture we have in our brain that helps us to communicate."
Sort on on the same topic - this is a great critique of a lot of behavior (especially marketing and self-promotions we see everywhere). This is worthwhile.
The endless echo chamber of online “influencers” is robbing the Internet of its soul.
According to Kamil, the other day somebody by the name of Yann Girard wrote a self-help article about something-or-other. Then another somebody named CamMi Pham wrote another, very similar self-help article, also about something-or-other. It’s clear that the two texts are similar, although CamMi’s got more attention. Here’s the deal: regardless of which article is better or worse–or which is more or less “authentic”–they’re both essentially rote rehashings of common cliches, the epitome of the reblogosophere, and that’s not a good thing.
The much bigger problem that I see, and the basis of this post, is this: upon reading both articles mentioned above, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that neither author actually cares about the message they’re sending, nor about the trials and tribulations of their readers, but about exploiting the patterns of their readers for viral loops. CamMi claims to be a digital marketer, so this makes sense. One of the worst things about living in 2015, the pièce de merde if you will, is the zergling rush of online self-promoters who delight in clicks and follows in the same way that slot machine addicts are lulled into pennilessness by playful sounds.
Even more troubling, these self-promoters (sorry, “digital strategists”) are peddling a product that’s worse than snake oil: not a cure-all for their readership, but an empty vessel for their own self-aggrandizement, or some increment of it, repackaged as an article or an aphorism or a piece of advice just for you, dear reader.
Except that these digital strategists (sorry, “new media consultants”) have no interest in your actually benefiting from the article or even in the content of the article itself. Their one and only concern is that you click, click, click, and follow, follow, follow. And the more of us who follow suit, the easier it is for these people to command our attention. Never mind what their actual message is — in most cases there isn’t one.
Recently the idea that the ‘shelf-life’ of ‘apps’ was nearing its end as they would be displaced by the advance of personal artificial intelligence agents - e-ssistants. Even the current mobile platform may already be approach a peak as the smartphone screen shifts to some form of mixed reality -with a virtual reality screen.
Here’s a prediction from business analysts.
Goldman Sachs says VR will be bigger than TV in 10 years
In an analyst note published on Wednesday, Goldman Sachs predicted that the virtual reality (VR) market will outpace the TV market in annual revenue by 2025, making VR bigger than TV.
The banking firm writes that the VR market will generate $110 billion dollars compared to TVs $99 billion in 10 years.
This will happen if VR adoption follows their “Accelerated Uptake” projection, in which virtual reality becomes more commonplace through advances in battery and cellular technologies. By eventually ditching the current wires and accompanying computers needed to power high-end VR headsets, the devices would become truly mobile; think a headset that's more akin to a pair of sunglasses than the bulky goggles of the first generation Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
That's in-line with what Facebook's Oculus has said it is aiming for in the past.
This has been a theme in sci-fi for awhile now - but soon to a chair or space near you.
Can Augmented Reality Make Remote Communication Feel More Intimate?
A Microsoft Research study uses augmented reality to project a life-size person into a room with you, perching them in an empty seat.
Nothing beats talking to another person face-to-face, but a group of researchers are considering whether a life-size projection of a person that appears to be sitting across from you in an actual chair might be a close second.
Room2Room, a project from Microsoft Research, does just this: it uses Kinect depth cameras and digital projectors to capture the image of a person in 3-D in one room and project a life-sized version of that person in real time onto a piece of furniture in another room, where someone else is actually hanging out, and vice versa. Each person can then see a digital image of the other with the correct perspective, look at the other person from different viewpoints, and interact accordingly, the researchers say.
A paper on the work will be presented at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in San Francisco at the end of February.
Augmented reality—the idea of combining digital images with real life—has been around for years, but it’s only recently that the technology has started to catch on. Microsoft is among the companies trying to popularize AR by testing out its HoloLens headset, which it envisions as a tool for work and play, and secretive Florida-based startup Magic Leap is also working on a head-worn device that has similar aims
Just to help you imagine the world of virtual and mixed (virtual & real) reality - the pictures and gifs are a must see.
MIT’s insane new app lets you ‘edit’ reality
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/15381/reality-editor-app/?tw=kr
The future promised by the Internet of Things still feels like it’s a long way away. But when (and if) it arrives, the Swiss army knife for fiddling with devices and connections may come courtesy of MIT.
Valentin Heun, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, has released the Reality Editor, a smartphone app that lets users pair just about any object to another. The augmented reality app shows the unseen wires of the digital world and makes it easy to draw new connections that create new functionality.
For example, you can point the camera of your smartphone at a knob, and the app will display its functionality. Then you can drag and drop that functionality to an object like a light. Once the connection is created, you can turn the knob and the light will turn on or off. You’ve created an impromptu light switch.
The Reality Editor uses open Internet standards to communicate with smart objects, and all data communication is controlled by the user, decentralized and owned by the object. The objects send their identifying information and network IP addresses to Reality Editor, which creates decentralized private networks between the objects. This means instead of devices communicating with the cloud to do the computing that eventually processes a command, everything with the Reality Editor is happening within the object itself.
This approach is vastly different than the one taken by the Internet of Things, which uses a cloud-based system. “Imagine an IoT heating system in a cold winter night and because of a blizzard the Internet stops working and therefore your heating system [stops],”
This is a great example of how assembling knowledge networks not only enables the scaling of learning and how intellectual capital (knowledge, talent, skills, etc.) is more valuable than simply money.
In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity
The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.
Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.
A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,” kaizen is a main ingredient in Toyota’s business model and a key to its success, the company says. It is an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance. Put more simply, it is about thinking outside the box and making small changes to generate big results.
Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.
At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.
Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank.
This should not be surprising news - but it’s something we shouldn’t forget either.
More people in Europe are dying than are being born
More people in Europe are dying than are being born, according to a new report co-authored by a Texas A&M University demographer. In contrast, births exceed deaths, by significant margins, in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S., with few exceptions.
Texas A&M Professor of Sociology Dudley Poston, along with Professor Kenneth Johnson, University of New Hampshire, and Professor Layton Field, Mount St. Mary's University, published their findings in Population and Development Review this month.
The researchers find that 17 European nations have more people dying in them than are being born (natural decrease), including three of Europe's more populous nations: Russia, Germany and Italy. In contrast, in the U.S. and in the state of Texas, births exceed deaths by a substantial margin.
Another magic material that could transform winter clothing and other material to capture solar energy for heat.
New Material Can Store Solar Energy During the Day and Release it Later as Heat
Engineers from MIT have developed a new material could harvest sunlight by day and release heat on demand hours or days later.
Imagine if your clothing could, on demand, release just enough heat to keep you warm and cozy, allowing you to dial back on your thermostat settings and stay comfortable in a cooler room. Or, picture a car windshield that stores the sun’s energy and then releases it as a burst of heat to melt away a layer of ice.
According to a team of researchers at MIT, both scenarios may be possible before long, thanks to a new material that can store solar energy during the day and release it later as heat, whenever it’s needed. This transparent polymer film could be applied to many different surfaces, such as window glass or clothing.
Although the sun is a virtually inexhaustible source of energy, it’s only available about half the time we need it — during daylight. For the sun to become a major power provider for human needs, there has to be an efficient way to save it up for use during nighttime and stormy days. Most such efforts have focused on storing and recovering solar energy in the form of electricity, but the new finding could provide a highly efficient method for storing the sun’s energy through a chemical reaction and releasing it later as heat.
The finding, by MIT professor Jeffrey Grossman, postdoc David Zhitomirsky, and graduate student Eugene Cho, is described in a paper in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. The key to enabling long-term, stable storage of solar heat, the team says, is to store it in the form of a chemical change rather than storing the heat itself. Whereas heat inevitably dissipates over time no matter how good the insulation around it, a chemical storage system can retain the energy indefinitely in a stable molecular configuration, until its release is triggered by a small jolt of heat (or light or electricity).
One more milestone on the highway to new energy geo-politics.
It's the End of the Beginning of the End for Coal
The government has suspended new coal leases on federal land. The coal industry may never recover.
The Bureau of Land Management has just announced a long-term moratorium on new leases to mine coal on federal lands. While the 18- to 36-month moratorium is in place, the government will launch a suite of studies to determine how to make coal leases fair to United States taxpayers and consistent with the country’s commitment to climate change mitigation.
Given the beleaguered state of the U.S. coal industry, it’s probably inaccurate to call the announcement the beginning of the end. It’s more like the middle of the end. Or the end of the beginning of the end. Or ... you get the idea. By the time the moratorium lifts, there may be little left of the coal industry.
The BLM’s move applies a set of pincers to coal, with economic challenges pressing in on one side and environmental ones tightening on the other.
Coal is a highly carbon-intensive source of energy. It’s responsible for 77 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. electricity sector but generates just 39 percent of the energy.
The progress of science seems at time to be stranger than fiction - as William Gibson notes - science fiction can’t keep up with today.
New Quantum Record: Ball of Atoms Ends up in Two Spots at Once
Researchers have demonstrated the effects of superposition on the scale of everyday objects.
QUANTUM MECHANICS AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS
Of the weird implications of quantum mechanics, superposition may be the hardest for humans to wrap their minds around. In principle, superposition means that the same object can exist in more than one place at the same time.
Ordinarily, superposition is only relevant on the microscopic scale of subatomic particles. Effects on this scale are the key to some possibly groundbreaking technologies, like quantum computing. No one has ever demonstrated quantum effects on the scale of Schrödinger’s cat–the mythical unobserved cat in a box that is both alive and dead at the same time.
But researchers from Stanford University’s Department of Physics recently published a paper in Nature documenting their successful attempt to show quantum superposition on a macro scale. Their efforts examine well known elements of quantum mechanical theory and “explore the transition to classical physics.”
For Fun?
This is new - a perennial problem.
Worst passwords of 2015 unveiled by SplashData
123456 is tops again, but lots of new entries are longer or Star Wars themed
If your password is on this list, you better change it ASAP. The 25 worst passwords of 2015 have been released by Los Gatos, Calif.-based SplashData.
The company, which makes password management software, compiles the annual list from the most common passwords leaked online each year — more than two million in 2015.
Think 1qaz2wsx is a strong password? Think again. It's based on the first two columns of keys on a standard keyboard, and it made No. 15 on this year's list.
It was among several new and longer passwords on the list for the first time, along with qwertyuiop and 1234567890. They suggest users and websites may be making more of an effort to make their passwords more secure, SplashData said.
