> The funniest (and somewhat unrelated thing) is that we're all
> supposed to change our passwords every thirty days. What this means
> of course is that everyone writes their pw down and tapes it to
> their computer...otherwise, how could you possibly keep anything
> straight. Which of course means that the system is less safe than
> ever. LOL.
A better trick than writing them down is to pick a "strong" password by initialising a phrase and then adding a numerical index in the middle of it.
"I love to eat at the oyster bar" could be:
iLteat315OB
When it comes time to change your password, increment the 315 to 316.
Some systems have a rule to thwart this trick: they require more than one character to be different. A way around that is to also increment after which word the index number occurs. If you need a non-alphanumeric character, you can make sure your initialised phrase contains an "a", "s", or "i" and then substitute the "@", "$", or "!" characters, respectively. So the above password would be:
Or just use a tool like KeePass and put the password data file in a folder synced to the cloud with a program like Dropbox; if you change passwords at home/work/smartphone you are only maintaining one copy. :)
Matt
-- GnuPG Key ID: 0xC33BD882 aim/google/MSN/yahoo: beyondzero123
I do not want to die without any scars.
-Tyler Durden