Avoid Password Oppression

More Tips and Tools

Do It Yourself

There's still hope if you should happen to lose your wallet and your memory. You can store Web site passwords inside your Netscape Bookmarks.

In Netscape 3.0 and higher you can easily stash passwords in the bookmark's Description field. First go to Edit Bookmarks, and right-click the bookmark for which you want to hide your password. Next select Bookmark Properties. In the Description box, enter your user name and password or a password hint.

Reading Between the Words

Schou suggests selecting a cryptic password by choosing a series drawn from the first letters of the words in a line from a poem or song. For example, "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" yields sbcatm.

Beware of Password Pirates

Don't give your password to anyone, no matter who asks for it. No matter how many times AOL warns its members about giving out their passwords, scammers posing as AOL employees still manage to trick people.

Still other password buccaneers have written JavaScript programs devised to make a bogus error message appears on your screen: "You have been disconnected from the computer you dialed. Please reenter sign-on information to reconnect."

Once you click OK, another window appears that looks nearly identical to the Windows 95 and 98 dial-up window that's used to launch a connection to an Internet service provider. Once you fill in the information, the program could e-mail it to someone else.

Personal Password Algorithm

Create a formula for devising all your passwords. Schou suggests picking significant dates and wrapping them into acronyms that symbolize the event.

An example for picking a password for work might be choosing your fist day on the job. By taking the month, event, year, and day of the week you might end up with 10fdw92mon as a password. The 10 stands for the month of the year, October; fdw is short for "first day of work"; 92 represents the year; and mon means Monday.

Hired Gun

You might also consider storing your passwords in a list and encrypting them using a program such as Symantec's Norton For Your Eyes Only. Numerous password utilities are commercially available. Once freeware program is Password Pal by Dotted Decimal Software, available on PC World Online's FileWorld.

Password Pal places keys on your toolbar that you click to access your passwords and log-on names. Click on the key, and up pops a box with all your passwords and log-in names. But, of course, the key itself is password-protected.

Another program, Webpass, is a $12 shareware tool from C3 Software and also available on FileWorld. Webpass will enter your password into a Web site for you at the click of a button, but it doesn't store it in password-protected form.