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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.
 
Some people like to pick several small words, separated by punctuation marks of some kind.
 Put a punctuation mark in the middle of a word, e.g., ``vege%tarian''.
 Use some unusual way of contracting a word. You don't have to use an apostrophe.
 
 One of my favorite passwords was ``kEp*-h&y'': ``kEp'' --> ``keep'', ``*-'' --> ``laser'' (like those signs that you see outside of physics labs), and ``h&y'' --> ``handy''; ``Keep your laser handy!'' 
 
You can use control characters. Just bear in mind that a lot of them have special meanings. If you use ^D, ^H or ^U, for example, you might not be able to log in again. 
 
Think of an uncommon phrase, and take the first, second or last letter of each word. ``You can't always get what you want'' would yield ``ycagwyw''. Throw in a capital letter and a puntuation mark or a number or two, and you can end up with ``yCag5wyw''. 
 
Deliberately misspelling one or more words can make your password harder to crack.
 Use several of the techniques above. 
 
Something that no one but you would ever think of. The best password is one that is totally random to anyone else except you. It is difficult to tell you how to come up with these, but people are able to do it. Use your imagination!

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