You have a username and a password for many things on the net. You must keep your passwords secret! If someone else gets your password, they can get into your account, read your mail, delete your files, change your files, change your mail, use your account as a stepping stone to breaking into other people’s accounts, and generally cause havoc of biblical proportion.

Keep your password to yourself, and change it whenever you think it might have been ‘compromised’. A good password is one that’s easy for you to remember, and hard for a computer to guess. Every word in the English or any other major language is out. Numbers that have meaning, especially dates, are out. There are only a small number of dates, and computers are very good at checking every possible combination of a small list.

The current fashion is to use the first letter of an arcane phrase. “From the dawn of time, we came.” could give “ftdotwc”. Unix is case sensitive--uppercase letters are different letters than lowercase. So an even better password from that phrase, and just as easy to remember, is “Ftdotwc”. If you can include numbers and punctuation, that’s even better: “Ftdot,wc.”

By the way, since they’re printed here, none of those examples are any good. Don’t use them.

Your last name sucks as a password. Just thought I’d tell you that. Even backwards. It is important to remember the “it only takes one rule” on the net: it doesn’t matter if most people aren’t going to go to the trouble to try to guess your password, because it only takes one.

Services on the Net

The net is a hell of a lot more than just a bunch of gossips. It’s a bunch of gossips who all write their own books. If information is power, then thar’s gold in them thar hills.