Friday, September 12, 2008

Passwords

I don't have any idea how secure the internet is. I've just kind of assumed that it is safe, so I haven't had any hesitation looking up checking account information and credit card bills and balances in retirement accounts (at least, that is, when I'm using my own private computer at home--I wouldn't think of doing any of that stuff from a public computer, say, in a hotel). To do any of this, of course, I need a password for the bank and for VISA and for my retirement fund. I've also got passwords for health insurance, car insurance, netflix, youtube, ticketmaster, Wikipedia (I've contributed to a couple of its articles), a bike store, two blogs, 3 (at least) e-mail accounts, and goodness only knows what all else. To keep track of all these passwords, I've been storing them in a Word file. Until today.

Today I started using KeePass, a program that creates and manages passwords. It's not the easiest program to learn, but I think I'm getting the hang of it now. And I think it has at least two advantages over the Word file I had been using:
  • KeePass keeps the passwords in an encrypted database; I never bothered encrypting the Word file.
  • KeePass generates weird passwords that no one could guess in a million years--passwords like FCQYKC7qaUqYzdnKD2Ej--and each site gets its own unique password. When I make up my own password, I am spectacularly unimaginative and I usually wind up with some variant on the title of a Dostoevski novel; if anyone figured out one of my passwords, he'd pretty quickly figure out what most of the others are.
As I said at the beginning, I don't have any idea how secure the internet is. Thus, I don't know whether the complicated passwords that KeePass creates are worth the trouble. I guess I do feel a little safer though, having my checking account protected by FCQYKC7qaUqYzdnKD2Ej instead of by the_idiot.

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