25 May 2005

Pick a good password, part III:

One system that I read about years ago was to customize passwords for every site in the same way. So, for example, if your name is George W. Bush and your favorite number is 43, simply incorporate that into every password. Also use a certain number of letters from the site. I use 5. Want to login to Yahoo? Maybe your password is gwb43yahoo. How about Hotmail? gwb43hotma. Lifehacker? gwb43lifeh. It’s worked for me for years.

Oh, that’s all fine if you trust every site you subscribe to. I wouldn’t ever think of using the same, easily figurable, password convention on every gay chatroom, where gay webmasters and sub-webmasters and their friends are liable to know me and hence have a reason to take advantage of it (even the paranoid have real enemies — and Im not even paranoid, only pragmatic). And even the bigger sites… do you really want the whole technical staff at Yahoo, and anyone they know, to get your password to every other site you have subscribed to?^*

Not to mention I would even less think of bragging in public.

^* : but then, you already do use the exact same password on every site, so… forget I even talked about it (for a change).