[Discuss] Passwords (was Thunderbird problem)

[Adam Parkin]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> I trust most Linux distros are more secure than windows machines, but that
> is not saying much, and regardless of OS, it is unlikely any computer
> connected to the internet is safe against a determined effort to crack it.
> Time to immediately change your root password to something completely
> different than your bank account password!

Good advice, and one more piece of free advice: if you're like me and 
can't remember a gazillion different passwords, come up with a scheme 
for generating them.  One possible scheme is to insert letters from the 
service the password is to be used for into your "standard" password. 
For example, lets say your normal password is "helloWorld", and you want 
a "secure" password for your Gmail account, then you might use something 
like:

helloGmailWorld

or:

helloWorldGmail

Etc, etc.  Now you only need remember one password, and the scheme you 
use to generate the password.  Each service will have a similar 
password, but will be just slightly different.  Of course this is just 
an example, you can make schemes arbitrarily complex (OTOH, if the 
scheme is too complex, it tends to defeat the purpose).  Other 
possibilities include taking the name of the service, but reversing the 
letters, or only taking a certain number of letters from the name of the 
service, etc.  "Secure" passwords typically contain both numbers and 
letters, so you might incorporate some number into the password as well 
(maybe include the number of characters in the name of the service, so 
instead of "helloGmailWorld" you might do "helloGmailWorld05" since 
Gmail is 5 characters long).

And for the record: the scheme I just described is not the scheme I use 
for my passwords. =8-p
-- 
--
Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at gmail.com
Blog: http://pzelnip.blogspot.com/
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