Keeping Your Computer Private

It's all about good passwords...
How would you react if you found out that your email had been accessed without your permission? How would you feel if all your personal and private information had been leaked and was available for anyone who wanted it?

Good passwords are hard to come by. Most of us have to pick our passwords rather suddenly without much warning? Go beyond your name, your partners name birthdays, favourite colors etc. You can probably already see a pattern forming here, can't you? Ok, now for the scary part: most passwords are easily guessed and provide virtually no protection.. on the foot path where everyone can see it and grab it!

So how do we fix this? We think up a better password. Stay away from passwords that are too long and cryptic. Chances are you are going to forget them to write down; which means they are easily forgotten? Please no! That's the sort of password that snooping people want! So we need to strike a balance somewhere One that is much more than some simple detail, yet cryptic enough that it couldn't be guessed too easily.

Let's assume for a second your name is Andrew. Now, say Andrew wants something simple, yet based on his name which will act as a "keyword" to help him easily recall his password. We'll mix in some UPPER and lower case characters and some numbers to replace letters, also known as elite speak, or 1337 speak. He might come up with up AnDr3w. That's decent. If one of your hobbies is let's say surfing he might try and combine his passion with his password. We'll abbreviate "internet" as simply "net". Here come the substitution and we get "n3T". Excellent! Now to combine them as two words. Now most people separate words with a space " ", but on the internet, that is best represented as an underscore "_". So, we'll combine them both using our new tricks to get "AnDr3w_n3T". Excellent!

What you need is a password that you don't have to write down, is uncrackable, simple and comfortably to use. I say "practically" because given enough time, any password in the world can be cracked. But this one should keep the password crackers busy and by the time they're even remotely close to it, he's changed it and they will have to begin again.

Why not think of a nursery rhyme whereas you take the first letter of every word and add a number or letter.g.: "baa baa black sheep have you any wool" turns into "bbbshyaw" and "humpty dumpty sat on the wall" turns into "hdsotw2005". Let your imagination run wild with the sorts of passwords you can create using this technique.

So the next time you hear of someone's account being broken into, or see someone trying to find a sticky note with their password on it, just remember, with a password created using the above techniques you wont really have to worry as much about either of those problems.

Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com 

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