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Showing posts from May 5, 2013

How to Choose a Good Password

I know that coming up with a good password can be difficult, so here are some guidelines to use.    Choose a password that is at least six characters long. This should be long enough to discourage a brute-force attack. Currently, the maximum password length on many Unix systems is eight characters, but if you want to add a few more characters to make it easier to remember, go ahead. Just bear in mind that anything after the eighth character will be ignored (so ``abnormalbrain'' is the same as ``abnormal'').    In general, a good password will have a mix of lower- and upper-case characters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and should be at least 6 characters long. Unfortunately, passwords like this are often hard to remember and result in people writing them down. Do not write your passwords down!   The license plate rule: take a phrase and try to squeeze it into eight characters, as if you wanted to put it on a vanity license plate.