Origninally published in October 2009.
Passwords. Gotta love”em. Or not!. Such a pain in the posterior to first come up with a meaningful password then to remember it time after time even if it is only used occasionally.
There are applications that assist in password management.
I use ‘1password’ on my Macintoshes. I create 14 character password containing numbers, letters,and special characters. That’s the ‘1′ in ‘1password’. Then I SHOULD allow the program create all the hundreds of passwords that I use in my daily missions on the Net. But I don’t. I’m always afraid that something will go wrong with my Mac and I won’t be able to access my bank account or Amazon.com or any of my ’simply have to have’ web sites. Yeah, for those of you Macsters, I don”t even trust the Keychain.
So what do I do? I like the idea of having passwords that have some basis in reality but only to me. One way of doing that is to pick a phrase from a movie or song, choose the first letter of each word of that phrase, then change some of the letters to numbers or special characters.
Method 1:
For instance, let’s take the nursery rhyme about that bad boy who stole a pie, Jack Horner.
Little Jack Horner Sat In A Corner – that’’s enough to work with – 7 character passwords seem to be popular.
Let’’s take the first letter of each word – LJHSIAC. Ok, good so far.
Now let’’s change some of those letters into numbers – a number 1 is a good substitute for the letter ‘I’ and a 4 is good as an ‘A’ so now we have LJHS14C.
Now you can choose to modify the letters by making some of them capitalized and some of them lower case. AND, you can choose to add a special character anywhere in the password. lJhS14c&- is a possibility.
You may want to concentrate on doing the same thing each time you create a new password, for example in the previous method, you can remember to , “change ‘I’ to ‘1′, ‘A’ to ‘4′, ‘E’ to ‘3′, ‘O’ to ‘0′”. Also, you could say “starting with the first letter, alternate lower case with upper case where there are letters”. Also, “at the end of the password, append a ‘&’ and a ‘-’”
Method 2:
I also like the idea of having passwords with the same beginning and ending but with some 1, 2, or 3 character difference in the middle. A way of doing this is to choose a couple of beginning letters – could be your initials, or a famous person’s initials, or your sweetie’s initials. Let’’s say we’ll use George Washington as our choice. So we start with GW.
Now pick 4 digits – a month and year – but don’t pick your birthday, anniversary, or any date associated with your family. Let’s arbitrarily choose August of 2009 and get 0809. Append that to our first two characters to get GW0809.
Now comes your variable part. You can choose 1, 2 or 3 characters that have something to do with the account where the password will be used, for example,’PP’ for PayPal. ‘A’ for Amazon, ‘BA’ for BankAmerica. You get the idea. Now we can have something along the lines of GW0809BA.
Now comes the part where you have to think. I know, I know. It may hurt.
You can end the password by putting the numbers 1, or 12, or 123. The way you choose that can be based on how many letters you used for the account name. Use ‘1′ for the single letter A in Amazon, ‘12′ for the two-letter designations (BA for BankAmerica and PP for PayPal) and end up with GW0809BA12.
Method 3:
A variation on the previous method could be done by choosing those same two initials and appending a 2-digit number based on each initial’s position in the alphabet. For GW, G is at position 7 and W is at position 23. Now the first four characters would be GW0723. Choose the following characters as just shown or create your own method. Just be consistent.
Use any of these systems or one of your own, but…use a system which will allow your to remember your password when it’s required or for sure on the next attempt if you have to remind yourself of the method.
Of course, your mileage may vary. In that case, buy and use ‘1password’ for the Macintosh which may be seen at http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
or ”RoboForm” for Windows at http://www.RoboForm.com
I have used both and am currently using 1password since these days, I’m a Mac.