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A Suggestion for Internet Passwords PREAMBLE: Do you have trouble remembering the multitude of passwords that seem to be required in order to surf the internet? Well I do... I had little sticky notes, pieces of paper, notepad files, and popup desktop reminders all containing various passwords that I had needed to use various services, newsletters, web site contents, on-line banking, e-mails, etc. I must of had at least 50 passwords that were active and definitely not handy, when I had to use them. That was over 5 years ago. It was then that I developed a system. I'll explain it in the following system.... Addendum - 14 March 2004 Addendum - 11 May 2004 [Ed Holm] The System: You will quickly discover that the average site wants a password of at least six characters...while some require eight. I recommend that an internet password MUST be a minimum of eight characters with at least one of those characters a number and at least one of those characters be non-alphabetic and non-numeric (such as [!@#$%^&*()_+=-]). This system is based on a split password: A: the front part made up of at least 4 characters. B: the rear part is obtained from the first 4 characters that are displayed in the top left corner of the browser showing the name of the web site that your are visiting. Some examples of A: Jj&35 xyz9# a5b*c Some examples of B: cana - www.canada.com free - www.freesoftware.com brig - www.brightoncomputerclub.org Top of Page Using a sticky tag, post your front part on your monitor. For example, let's use the first one in A: Whenever you visit one of the sites in B: you now know the password. To form the complete password, just put them together: Jj&35cana Jj&35free Jj&35brig As you can see, you don't have to remember anything. When you next visit the site, you look on your monitor for the front part of the password; and you look on the site itself for the rear part of the password. PLEASE DO NOT USE THE A: EXAMPLES FOR THE FRONT PART OF YOUR PASSWORD MAKE UP YOUR OWN TO ENSURE CONFIDENTIALITY! If you have any questions or want a further explanation, send me an e-mail from the Contact page. Frank Myers Top of Page Addendum - March 14th, 2004 The following advice is an exerpt from The Langa List technical newsletter - which I am a subscriber: For personal use, assuming your password indeed is a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and punctuation; and not simply a word you'd find in a dictionary; or something obvious like a pet's name; then a password length of 6 is usually considered the rock-bottom minimum for reasonable safety; 8 is OK; 10 is good; and anything north of 10 is excellent. A 63 character password would be silly in most personal-use situations! Your 10 character passwords are probably fine for most normal uses. Thus, something like "cat" is a lousy password; "CaT+4i2" is better; and something like "i!"^45&kq#JT.a" is better still--- almost impossible to guess. Top of Page Further Comments: I think that a good concept to follow that can be easy to remember is to use the first letters of the beginning of your favourite quote. For example: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Now take the first letter of each word: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. And you end up with: Tqbfjotld That sequence, by itself, could be a good password. However; to make it an excellent password, just use the first 5 letters and add something like the following: T!q@b#f$j% I added a character from the shifted number row at the top of the keyboard in between the first five letters of the quote. If you don't want to use all special characters in between, you could use the substitute number instead and/or captilize more than one letter - perhaps the last one. Don't forget you are trying to make it easy to remember and easy to type in. With a 10-character password there are about 3,743,906,242,624,490,000 possible combinations for a hacker to try. And PLEASE DON'T USE THE EXACT EXAMPLES SHOWN. This is a public forum. Frank Myers Top of Page Addendum - May 11th, 2004 - Ed Holm This is a method of saving multiple passwords so you don't forget them. While in France I saw it on the BBC TV Tech program. It seemed to make sense. A METHOD OF SAVING MULTIPLE PASSWORDS. Think of a word that you won't forget. A word you are very familiar with and no chance of forgetting. An old uncommon family name, like " Jeremiah". Or maybe a favourite vegetable "squash". Just about any word you won't forget. You need a password for an Internet Email site. Let use the word squash and we will put 4T in front of squash and 98W after it Your password is now 4Tsquash98W. You need a password for another site, lets name it 8Rsquash22H Every time you need a new password you always use squash with letters or numbers before and after squash. Remember, your secret word will never be written down anywhere but only kept in your memory Advantage: Say you have 3 sites and your secret word is squash you will now make a list like this: Yahoo Email 26Y 73R MSN 46P 38J Canada.com 87M 63Z You can now keep a list showing only the letters or numbers before and after the secret word that is only in your memory. All of your password is never written down only the prefix and extensions and they can be numbers and letters and you can have all the passwords you like. Do not keep this list in you computer. If it crashes you might never recover them. Ed Holm Top of Page