This is a post that does not directly relate to Astronomy but it may affect your enjoyment if you have lax security. One thing I have had a look at recently is Internet security. It is amazing home many sites I now visit that require a logon and like most of us I have had the problem of trying to remember the password. If you use the password "fred", which is surprisingly popular, for all the websites you visit it is not very secure. Also if a bad guy finds out that you visit www.petmydog.com and use a password called "fred" then the bad guy might guess that when you access you bank, your email, facebook, twitter or whatever you use the same password. I am probably preaching to the converted but you need strong passwords and should not duplicate that password in other sites. Then you hit the problem of how to remember them.
Paris Hilton's email account was hacked because she used her dog's name as a way of resetting her password. When you choose a question such as your mother's maiden name do not answer it with her true name but choose something that no one else can guess or discover.
So what should use as a password. Short passwords are weak. I have come across a single character used as password such as “a”. Very weak. If you use lower case characters you have 26 at your disposal. Include upper case and you have another 26. Include digits and the total rises to 62 characters. A one character password has 62 possibilities but again very weak. It would not take long to try all 62 possibilities. Two characters raise the number of possibilities to 3844. Still not high enough. Aim for 10 characters and you have 62^10 possibilities which is 839299365868340224. A brute force attack is pretty much impossible now.
Another no-no is dictionary words. Any password that can be found in a dictionary such as a word or name is at risk of being cracked by trying all the words in the dictionary. So avoid these.
We have now reached a problem. If you have a different password for all the sites your visit and use strong passwords then how do you remember them. It is a difficult task and the main reason that many people choose one or two passwords that they use across many sites. This is a problem that I have pondered for some time.
The solution I think is Lastpass (
www.lastpass.com). Lastpass lets you have a different password for each site and it will insert the logon details for you. All you need to remember is one master password and that gives access to your Lastpass vault that contains all your sites. This program is free to use (unless you also want to use it as an app on your phone when it is $1/month). I have played with it now for a couple of months and I cannot fault it. There is a very good programme about it here > http://www.twit.tv/sn256 where Steve Gibson a security guru discusses it at length. If you want to read a transcript of the program then you can find it here http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-256.txt. The discussion about Lastpass starts about halfway through.
Any comments then do post here.
