Do you hate trying to remember passwords? Are you so paranoid of hackers that you always create new ones to forget? Here is the easiest way to create and remember your password for any website.
It’s the Password Mashup.
Just pick one master password and mash it with a formula involving the website name. Here’s how it works: Say your core password is KoKo (you know, the chimp who used sign language). You create an account at Google. The password mashup can be KoKoGoo or GooKoko (the formula: using the first 3 letters of the site before or after your master password). Easy. And for added security, wrap the mash-up with a number or one of those strange characters, like the tilde, aka, the swung dash, squiggle, tiddle or Swedish line. It looks like this: ~. I like the tilde because it’s so hard to find on the keyboard. So is this one: |. So your Google password is ~GooKoKo~. At Amazon it’s ~AmaKoKo~. This great tip from the great Lifehacker.
Tip Tips: Some sites do not allow special characters, so have an alternative number wrap. If you come across a site that wants 12 characters, just lengthen the mashup by repeating the last number or character to meet the requirement— 7GooKoKo7777.
The risk, of course, is someone getting one password and breaking your formula code. So you may want to get a formula a little more creative than the first 3 letters of a site. Example: if the website name ends in a consonant, use the 3 letters as a prefix and use an even number wrap. If it ends in a vowel, use 3 letters as a suffix, with an odd number wrap. Or use the first and last letters of the site name. Oh, oh, now I’m confused again.
For a geeky-cool alternative, try Nic Wolff’s Password Composer. Once again, you need only remember one master password. You plug it into the composer to produce a unique password for the site. The password composer bookmarklet can be dragged to your toolbar or downloaded as a Firefox add-on (love that Firefox). There’s some kind of encryption going on involving concatenating two fields and MD5ing.
It works like this:
Google also has a password generator gadget. There’s also Hashapass which uses base64 encoding, whatever that is.
Old school: If you’d rather store all those different passwords try Keepass or Passwordsafe.
Technorati Tags: Password, tips, Password composer, Firefox add on, Google gadget, Hashapass
