Chances are, even if you haven’t had money stolen from you random emails sent out or your things being deleted. Your password has been leaked somewhere in the past year (there have been a lot of major security breaches in the past year).

Technically we should all have 3 levels of passwords, I rank them like this.

“I don’t really care”
5-6 characters alphanumeric

works for most sites that you just don’t care about/places that you don’t think your account will be hacked. I like to pick six letter words and then just transform them into “1337speak”

These passwords are great for actually logging into your desktop/netflix/whatever, or something that you’ll have to type in a lot, its more of a formality to stop other human beings from hopping on your stuff, not to stop “1337 hackerz” from getting into your important data.

Example: M0v3m3nt

This is somewhat important/will effect my life if someone gets hold of it
I would use this for my youtube password, facebook etc… You don’t want it to be too inconvenient to type in if you go to a friends house/you don’t like to save your passwords to your browser so you should keep it to two unrelated words around 6-7 words each, possibly with a number or symbol in place of the letter.

Example: G0rgeous M0v3m3nt

Bills/Email/other really important places that have  information that you don’t want to be public domain it would ruin my day if some random person on the internet got access to this.

For this I like to use a sentence that I can type relatively fast that is under 20 characters total, throw in a few caps, maybe a symbol, you can build your passwords on one another if you like (although its not particularly secure). This is the password that noone gets, if you share your first password that’s up to you, you probably shouldnt share you second password, and you definitely shouldn’t share this one.

Example: Cacophonou$ G0rgeous M0v3m3nt

In all reality you should be changing your level 1 password every 2-3 months, your level 2 password every 4-5 months and your level three password every 6-7 months.

These passwords don’t need to be a random conglomeration of numbers and letters, that just protects them against a human figuring them out via observing.

An additional note, a password of a random sentence can protect you against key-loggers (as it may or may not seem like you’re typing out a password, whereas “’417$$2 l=”5L&9″ typed regularly in sequence is almost assured to be a password.

http://passphra.se/ for an XKCD style password generator

NOTE:
You can be court ordered to unencrypt your data, so if you are trying to hide your information from legal channels, well, that’s just too bad.

Fun Fact: it would take the average home PC about 809 thousand years to crack the password P4$$\/\/OrD

Resources

http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Is a fun way to get a general concept of how secure your password is (its not incredibly accurate though and does not account for human involvement)

They have a sister site
http://makemeapassword.net/

which will help you think of words, even show you letters you can substitute.

http://www.passwordmeter.com/

Be safe!

You still have a chance to enter the giveaway!

It will be ending March 1st.

This giveaway features one free visual guide (yes, a guide with pictures) on the subject of your choosing, it will be printed on nice stock, bound (or sleeved) and mailed to you, as well as posted online as a downloadable PDF. Just shoot a tweet @anderstech, or leave a comment below with a link back to your blog to enter.

The question at hand in this post, how do I get those “fancy characters” into my website/post/handout. Well, I’m here to tell you that, fortunately it is incredibly simple! Even more fortunately, you don’t need to install anything to find the characters.

The simple Windows utility to have all of these characters at your fingers (literally) is called the character map, and it is located in the accessories section (where the calculator application is located) of your start menu, specifically, within the folder “system tools”.

So a quick run through of how to find this, click the start menu in the bottom left hand corner of your screen. > hover over (or single click) all programs > look for, and highlight (hover over) the accessories folder > highlight the system tools folder > select character map.

Congratulations! You’ve made it! (I hope)

If you’ve made it here you can start looking through all the wonderful characters that are at your fingers (told you). So, by default the font is (usually) set to Arial, however, if you want the full gamut of potential characters switch the font (up at the top) to Arial Unicode MS, this will show the full list of characters available for use on the web. Now you can be at ease, knowing that you can use interrobangs ‽ instead of a question mark and an exclamation point. Or, my personal favorite, you can include the infinity symbol in your posts ∞ , or in my mothers case a heart ❤.

If you have any questions that you want answered in future posts (or about this one) leave it in the comments below!

Additionally I’d like to note that we are having a giveaway!

This giveaway features one free visual guide (yes, a guide with pictures) on the subject of your choosing, it will be printed on nice stock, bound (or sleeved) and mailed to you, as well as posted online as a downloadable PDF. Just shoot a tweet @anderstech, or leave a comment below with a link back to your blog to enter.

Regardless, the first post has to do with Apple’s new EULA which has already picked up a lot of flack.

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

Now, the new iBooks app (iBook 2.0 as the app store affectionately calls it) is Apples way of “giving back”/”revolutionizing” the education “industry.” I say industry because the educational system of the US has become no more than a business.

The hype behind the most recent apple release was that it would quickly and easily allow individuals to not only have access to various sources of entertainment and educational material easily and affordably accessible to the masses (A goal the late great Steve Jobs had aspired to for a long while) however, many bored lawyers took to reading the EULA you would find yourself agreeing to if you were to “market your writing” through apples iBooks catalog. Apple could not pull the pages over their eyes as it was soon discovered that by marketing your works through Apple’s catalog, you were giving up 30% of your profits and effective copy rights of the aforementioned works.

This is especially pertinent in my opinion due to the recent SOPA/PIPA protests and their capabilities to take down sites/services featuring copy-written work (no questions asked) however  I will not go in depth on this matter as several people have already explained it far better than I could at 5:45AM.

Have you read that article that I just linked? Awesome, then hopefully you’re seeing the correlation at this point, if not, shoot me a message and I’ll make a clarifying post.

Returning to Apple, I believe that this is one of the first traces of Apple’s loss of Steve Jobs. I’m not saying he was a perfect guiding moral compass, but I would argue that he was more tactful in his methods. Spreading education and allowing individuals to pursue their “true dreams” (as corny as that may sound) did honestly seem to be one of Steve’s goals and I feel that in many ways Apple has lost that at its heart. By no stretch of the imagination have they reached a point of no return, but they do need to start checking themselves and soon for it is a very slippery slope to being shunned in the tech industry with geek culture being what it is these days.

All in all, A for effort Apple, B for intent, and D for follow-through.

PS: This post may be subject to edits later (reads after sleep) today.

edit: Feature image credit

Let me give you some details about the future intended formatting of this blog.

Through this blog I hope to share with you the wonders of the future of tech and business culture, answer a few questions, and hopefully have a few laughs along the way.

I would like to begin by detailing my primary sources for tech news, I have been a long time reader of Gizmodo (before the great iPhone debacle that has made them as large as they are now), an avid fan of Slashdot, and a regular viewer of Hacker News (or Ycombinator as some people refer to it). Over the next foreseeable future I hope to cherry pick some of my favorite articles from these news sources, give some insight on them from a business owner/young individual perspective and hopefully generate some interest in “geek culture” along the way.

I’ll be posting my first article later today (as its 2:00AM here now and I feel as if I have just gotten the new site to a point where I can step away from it). If anyone happens to stumble onto the blog in that time, please feel free to post any questions/comments/concerns/articles or whatever you want to throw my way.