If you do any online shopping and/or banking, user name and passwords have infiltrated your life. Many of my customers can easily knock one-half hour or more off their bill if they kept track of their passwords. I get many blank stares when I’m troubleshooting a machine and need to log into an Internet service or web site and I ask the customer for their password. Often times I receive the classic, “I don’t have a password.”
Everyone has a password for email, their bank, any other online service you might sign up for be it banking or a community forum.
Keeping track of passwords takes some diligence, but it absolutely must be done and approached sensibly.
Rule #1: DO NOT use the same password for everything you do. Using the same password can get you into online trouble faster than posting your credit card number on eBay.
Rule #2: Always write down your user name and password (and the date you obtained them). Preferably not on a sticky note that is attached to your monitor.
Rule #3: Use a mix of upper case and lower case, plus throw in some other characters as well, like * $ # @, etc. Using passwords like this make “cracking” a password much tougher. If you don’t believe me, read this interesting article I found on the subject.
Here are many more articles we have written that talk about how to properly manage your passwords.
Related articles:
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Good supporting articles you listed off. As a founder of an online password manager, I can’t help but notice that you forgot to mention the golden rule again in this article:
Choose – and USE – a Password Manager.
That should be the zeroth law (Asimov fans eat your heart out).
By getting your passwords safely stored and organized, you can make them as ludicrously long, complicated and senseless as need be, without having to commit them to memory.
By using an online service, you can access your passwords 24/7, even when you’re on the road (and without toting around a USB key chain).
Here is an online vs. offline comparison:
http://passpack.wordpress.com/2007/01/29/online-vs-offline-password-managers/
Cheers,
Tara
Good comments Rick ! I am a long time and very old listener. I have ( or had ) many many passwords and user names for the past 10 years or more. Hard as heck to remember—no no impossible to !!
I have kept a ” log ” book for most. However many many times when I try to log in I get a message to the effect ” INVALID “” !!! Some are sites I may not have used for many months !! Do they cancel my login info if I do not use their site for a while ??
Also many sites where I register on they ask for ” username or maybe email ” Password Somethimes like name address et.
I go throught all this exercise and many times get an error or problem message !!! Things like user name must be more that so many characters, password must be more than XXXX digites and less than- sometimes lower case etc—cannot use certain characters etc. — must contain letters and numbers and on and on.
I waste a heck of a lot of time going ” BACK ” !! Why don’t these nuts tell up up front the ” criteria ” necessary for user name and password” !!
George
Colorado
Thanks for the catch…all links are working now.
Some of the links at the end of your article lead to:
“Error 404
The page you are looking for does not exist on our site. Please use the search engine at the top or bottom of this page to search for your item.
Thank you.” I haven’t a clue as to why.