av8r
I'd Rather Be Flying
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join:2002-06-14
Boca Raton, FL
clubs:
| reply to EGeezer
Re: Stupid User Tricks: Password Selection - "WORD1"
While ROT-26 is certainly twice as secure as ROT-13, I have found that encoding once, and then encoding the encoded password is more effective. Double ROT-13 should be used as a minimum. I will admit, I have not yet tried Double ROT-26.
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David
No,there is another.
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join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL
clubs:
 ·DIRECTV
 ·magicjack.com
 ·AT&T Midwest
| Well if I may offer this little diblet this is the best password generator I have seen and seems to work rather well.
»www.pctools.com/guides/password/
Now there is no excuse as to why the myspace croud can't create a more complex password.
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alanhdsl
Premium
join:1999-10-09
Phoenix, AZ
·Qwest.net
| Those may be good passwords, but now you're inviting a yellow sticky note with "3REfrure" written on it.
The challenge is that good passwords are hard to remember, so people either pick simple ones and/or write them down. I'm not sure there's a good solution. |
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PolarBear
The bear formerly known as aaron8301
Premium
join:2005-01-03
 ·CableOne
| But it's VERY hard for a MySpace phishing bot to get the password from the yellow sticky note on the side of your monitor. Or any hacker, for that matter. All you have to worry about is the FBI raiding your house, and your evil little sister...
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AB
Premium
join:2006-04-04
Leesburg, VA
1 edit | reply to alanhdsl
said by alanhdsl  :Those may be good passwords, but now you're inviting a yellow sticky note with "3REfrure" written on it. The challenge is that good passwords are hard to remember, so people either pick simple ones and/or write them down. I'm not sure there's a good solution. Actually, the only challenge is to use something that's complicated, unique, and easy to remember-- or to discover if forgotten.
Sound tough? Not so! (Provided long passwords are allowed, at any rate.)
An example: #MoM:(555)893-12743215#
This is my mother's phone number (obviously not really) followed by her street address number.
All I have to remember, besides the phone number and street address, is that I use a lower case 'o' (or upper case 'm's) at the beginning along with a colon, and surround it with 'pound' signs.
Or I could put 'MoM' at the end instead of the beginning if I wanted to.
And of course my mother's phone number & street address are things that I'm likely to have memorized anyway. As well as that they are easily recovered should I forget them.
The point is that this is a very complicated password that's also not very difficult to remember, therefore negating any need to write it down.
All of my important passwords are structured similarly, and are written down nowhere-- certainly not as passwords, at any rate.
I've always found this to be a quite workable solution.
For stuff like logging into newspaper sites, it's 123 or whatever, because who cares?
Now, getting someone to actually spend the 5 or 10 minutes it takes to come up with a decent password is an issue of it's own.  |
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Mele20
Premium
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI
| The problem with long passwords, and especially all those numbers, is that you can't see what you are typing. Way too easy to transpose numbers. I'd probably type that a dozen times and never get it right and some sites only allow three attempts. I only use complex passwords for banking sites and didn't do it for them until recently.
There is no reason to x out passwords on the screen if the user isn't somewhere that others look over his shoulder or take photos from a distance. I always have wondered why that is done. That should be something that a user turns on if they need it otherwise what you are typing should show up on the screen. I'm always mistyping a password, even one that is not complicated and that I have typed many times, and it irritates me that I can't tell what I am typing.
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"The same ferocity that our founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic". Al Gore, The Assault on Reason |
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caffeinator
Coming soon to a cup near you..
Premium
join:2005-01-16
Spokane, WA
·WebBand
| I use "normal" length and complexity passwords on the average sites, althought I don't use anything less than 8 chars and mixedcase with numbers.
I have a textfile for the really long ones like banking and Paypal.
Those ones are mixed-case alphanumeric with symbols and over 12 chars long. (one is over 32chars)
I Copy/Paste 'em, so no worries. 
-CaFF
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nwrickert
sand groper
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join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL
 ·AT&T U-Verse
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to Mele20
The problem with long passwords, and especially all those numbers, is that you can't see what you are typing. My most important passwords are, I hope, hard to guess but easy enough for me to remember. There are very few of these.
For the rest, the passwords are in an encrypted file (actually an encrypted email to myself). I can decrypt, then cut and paste, to be sure I type it in correctly. The encryption pass phrase is one of those "most important passwords."
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Mele20
Premium
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI
| Gee, mine are all in two different folders. One for banking and another for all other passwords. All passwords for the past more than 8 years are there...lots and lots of them. It is quite irritating to have to go look up a password every time I have login somewhere. The one for here is the only one I remember. I wish a fingerprint thingy worked with Fx...I think those still work only with IE.
I never have understood why I can't turn offthe hiding of the password I type. There is no one here to see it so why can't I turn that off? I should be able to do that. It should be turned off by default for home users seems to me.
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"The same ferocity that our founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic". Al Gore, The Assault on Reason |
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Owlbet
Ignite the Ice
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join:2002-09-24
Palmer, AK
clubs:
·MTA Online
| reply to PolarBear
said by PolarBear :But it's VERY hard for a MySpace phishing bot to get the password from the yellow sticky note on the side of your monitor. Silly move on my part but done out of convenience for another adult member of my household: I wrote the user name and password for our router on the top of the router.
I recently had DTV installed. The first thing I did after the installer left was change the password on the router and black out the information I had previously written on it.
The other adult member now carries a laminated business card in his wallet with the router information on it. |
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angussf
Premium
join:2002-01-11
Tucson, AZ
| reply to caffeinator
said by caffeinator :I have a textfile for the really long ones like banking and Paypal. IIWY I would get some sort of encrypted password store instead of a text file. I use a Palm device, so I use YAPS with the YAPSviewer program on my desktop that allows me to cut-and-paste from the datastore. There are other packages, including OSS ones like KeePass Password Safe
»keepass.info/ so cost shouldn't be a concern here. That way you memorize ONE long complex password (to the password database) and look up all the rest, yet if someone steals your computer / laptop / PIM device, you haven't lost anything. |
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technick
Premium
join:2000-12-16
Loganville, GA
| reply to David
said by David :Well if I may offer this little diblet this is the best password generator I have seen and seems to work rather well. » www.pctools.com/guides/password/Now there is no excuse as to why the myspace croud can't create a more complex password. I use this on the fly for my users, works well and most of them are easy enough to remember.
At one point a few years ago before I found the above website, I used a program called pwgen, I believe it was in the debian apt repos.
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caffeinator
Coming soon to a cup near you..
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join:2005-01-16
Spokane, WA
·WebBand
| reply to angussf
said by angussf :IIWY I would get some sort of encrypted password store instead of a text file. I use a Palm device, so I use YAPS with the YAPSviewer program on my desktop that allows me to cut-and-paste from the datastore. There are other packages, including OSS ones like KeePass Password Safe » keepass.info/ so cost shouldn't be a concern here. That way you memorize ONE long complex password (to the password database) and look up all the rest, yet if someone steals your computer / laptop / PIM device, you haven't lost anything. Yeah, that's true..I should try that at some time.
In my situation, it's not much of a risk, as nobody else is ever here, and it's only a couple passwords. Also, they're not easily identified as such, just a couple lines amongst 100's of lines of other text.
I know what line it is, but others wouldn't.
Most all of my website passwords are kept in Opera's Wand.
(yeah, I know it's only MD5 hashed and can be recovered easy enough, but the chance of anyone getting to my computer three flights up in a locked security building is slim.)
Could my system be penetrated?
Maybe, but it hasn't happened yet in 15 years.
Besides, I have no money in the bank to take, no CC's, no credit, Nada. GL with stealing my identity..it'd be of no use to anyone. The only time I ever worried was when I got my wallet stolen awhile ago...much more bothersome than worrying over computer passwords IMO.
Simply put, I don't live like "normal" folks, so a lot of those rules aren't needed for me.
Thanks for mentioning it though.
-CaFF
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AB
Premium
join:2006-04-04
Leesburg, VA
| reply to Mele20
said by Mele20 :The problem with long passwords, and especially all those numbers, is that you can't see what you are typing. Way too easy to transpose numbers. I'd probably type that a dozen times and never get it right and some sites only allow three attempts. I only use complex passwords for banking sites and didn't do it for them until recently. There is no reason to x out passwords on the screen if the user isn't somewhere that others look over his shoulder or take photos from a distance. I always have wondered why that is done. That should be something that a user turns on if they need it otherwise what you are typing should show up on the screen. I'm always mistyping a password, even one that is not complicated and that I have typed many times, and it irritates me that I can't tell what I am typing. Sounds like a PEBKAC issue. |
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Mele20
Premium
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI | What's "PBEKAC"? |
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AB
Premium
join:2006-04-04
Leesburg, VA
| said by Mele20 :What's "PBEKAC"? Is that what I said? I thought I said "PEBKAC".
Google is your friend (well, my friend anyway.)
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC |
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Mele20
Premium
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI
| I transposed the letters as quite a few folks do all the time..I don't do it often thank goodness. I do it with numbers a great deal though.
If you are into playing games instead of answering my question...obviously it is irrelevant what it is. If I had wanted to use Scroogle to figure it out, I would have done so instead of politely asking you what you meant when the correct thing would have been for you to state what you meant in the first place. I asked for a fix for the stupid xxxx that one sees when typing a password. You gave me an acronym instead of a fix. Telling folks here who ask for help to use Google ...gee, why do we have these forums then? Everyone should just use a search engine if they need help. 
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"The same ferocity that our founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic". Al Gore, The Assault on Reason |
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Grail Knight
Who Dares Wins
Premium
join:2003-05-31
·Verizon Online DSL
1 edit | reply to Mele20
Re: Stupid User Tricks: Password Selection - "WORD1"
Searching for an answer before asking a question is the norm as many times the question has already been asked and answered.
PEBKAC: »/nsearch?q=PEBKAC&cat=
Here is one tool that will reveal passwords which I found through a search engine. There are many others if you look for them. This one is freeware and no I have not used it as the asterisks are a security measure no matter where you are inputting the password. Just because a person is inside their home does not mean that someone is not peaking over your shoulder.
AsterWin
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Edit* Corrected last sentence. |
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Thug21
Just Chillin'
Premium
join:2005-08-21
3 edits | reply to alanhdsl
For medium security, I come up with a long phrase that is easy to remember and then use the first letter of each word. It might not be totally random but it's better than a lot of things. |
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