I Spy P

Passwords are becoming a real headache. We have them for our mobile phones, chip and PIN cash cards, home security systems, parental control on cable boxes, telephone-banking codes and we are in double-figures when it comes to the computer.

I have almost forty passwords in my printed list that access a multitude of different services, half of which have only been used once but I keep them just in case. There are two different types of computer passwords: the ones that you forget within an instant and the ones that protect your personal information. However, as one guy proclaims: You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it!

Despite the overwhelming factor of having a different password for every website, it doesn't really make your surfing life safer, it enables you to save your settings easily and customise the site to your needs. For those who take security a little more seriously than '1234' or 'password', there are strong passwords that act as the proverbial rottweiler against hackers.

According to the mighty Microsoft, a good, strong password should be over eight characters in length, combines letters, numbers and symbols, but not sequential or repeating, and are not common words with letters replaced by numbers or symbols, such as 'M1cr0$0ft' or 'P@ssw0rd'.

They suggest thinking of a sentence that you can remember, such as "Ovi magazine is the best online magazine in the world", for example. Then take the first letter of the sentence to create a new word: 'omitbomitw'. Then mix it up using a combination of upper and lowercase letters and numbers, '0m1TbomiTw'. Finally, substitute some special characters that look like letters, '0m1Tb()m!Tw'. Now do this forty times for each of your passwords and watch somebody try to phish that.

Clifford Stoll, author of the 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil, stated that you should treat your password like your toothbrush. 'Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.' Good advice, yet most of our lives aren't designed to be that organised. We usually change our password when we realise that it has vanished from our memory and the next step is to click the "I've forgotten my password" link.

"Please remember my password" is so useful, yet a blatant security breach. It is tempting to use when you have a variety of passwords for your online banking, email accounts, online newspapers, forums, Messenger services, Skype, eBay, RealPlayer, Wikipedia, free SMS services, the local library, the BBC, Newcastle United, IMDB and even the Royal Mail. The function also saves us from the mental anguish and embarrassment of forgetting the answer to our cryptic secret question.

Today we are faced with the decision of using strong passwords and Microsoft Passport Network, if only it were as simple as 'Open sesame!'

A woman was helping her husband set up his computer, and at the appropriate point in the process, told him that he would now need to enter a password. The husband was in a rather humorous mood and figured he would try for the shock effect to bring this to his wife's attention. So, when the computer asked him to enter his password, he made it plainly obvious to his wife what he was keying in:
"P....E....N....I....S"
His wife fell off her chair laughing when the computer replied:
**** PASSWORD REJECTED. NOT LONG ENOUGH*****