Password Bird
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One of the things that people sometimes have a hard time with is creating passwords. Any online account that you maintain is probably going to require you to use a password, so you better have a collection of good passwords that you can easily remember. If you think hard enough, you’ll eventually come up with some good passwords to use, but if you need some help, a little bird told me that you can use Password Bird to get some suggestions.
Instead of generating completely random and complicated passwords that you’re sure to forget, Password Bird uses a special name, word, and date that you provide to construct a password that you’re more likely to remember. If you don’t like what you see, then you can continue to generate new passwords based off of the information that you provided before or entirely new information. Even if you’re confident in your ability to create your own passwords, you may still benefit from getting some hints about passwords that you might be able to use in the future.
2 Comments
Chrystoph
June 19th, 2008
at 4:17am
Alternatively, you can use a system where you use the same root passowrd every time, but make it unique with a mnemonic.
A typical example would be to use the first X number of characters in the domain of the site you are building a password for.
Example for Lockergnome: password1LOC
The standard password would be password1 and the unique would be the first 3 characters of lockergnome.
Mike
June 19th, 2008
at 12:57pm
A few years back, my company got sold to another, and one of the first things the new IT folks did was mandate Password Type, Size, and Expiration. To add to the confusion, you couldn’t use one from within the last ten monthly changes. The first password was assigned, and you had to change it at first use; I was granted “ttH2m5Mx^8″ (without the quotes!) Also found out right quick that ‘Tab’ between the original and changed and verified failed; had to Mouse-Select the fields!
After a short while, I recalled a discussion I’d had with some Crypto folks in the Navy — “Pick a Pass Phrase and ADAPT it”. Cool — we all recognise TEOTWAWKI “The End Of The World As We Know It — so pick your own and change vowels to look-alike numbers — T30tw4wk1 — or whatever. Obviously pick something that is personal to you that you can remember, so your next change uses the second letters — hnfhs3nt — and so on. If you have to write down the phrase and discard it later, it’s doubtful anyone will guess the manner in which you adapted it to your needs.
In any event, always remember one caveat — if it’s on the Web it can be hacked.