Matt Conlon dot Com

Information is one of the most important things in our lives. In the wrong hands, our information can be devastating to ourselves and possibly those around us. Protecting our information is imperative, yet people are still choosing passwords that are either obvious or weak.

We lock our cars, we lock our windows, and we lock our garages. We buy paper shredders to make sure no one steals our identities from our garbage. Yet we tend to be more lax when it comes to our information.

The passwords you choose are just as important as the locks on your front door. These passwords are what keep your personal, business, financial and other information from falling into the hands of a criminal.

Here are 10 tips to observe when protecting your information with a password.

1.
Never leave it blank. A blank password is the easiest password to guess, and will be the first thing someone will try.

2.
Avoid the obvious. The use of birthdays, names of loved ones, and the use of “pa55w0rd” should always be avoided.

3.
Change your password at least every 90 days.

4.
Use a mix of numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols.

5.
Never share your password.

6.
Never write your password under your keyboard or anywhere else.

7.
Never use the same password on multiple accounts

8.
Never reuse old passwords.

9.
Use an acronym like “IwNSmp” (I will not share my password)

10.
Never use a password you’ve found online.

You may recall a while back, Actually a year ago this October, I'd rambled about email and how private it really was. ...Or wasn't. (http://www.mattconlon.com/news.php?extend.5.4)

Well, recently in talking with someone over google's instant messenger, Google Talk, which the person to whom I was speaking was using through their web based version... If you have a gmail account, you'll notice it on the left side. Well, you may also notice along the top, there's advertisements... Well my fellow chatter and I were talking about migraines. When the advertisement ticker refreshed for him, it was about a new migraine medicine.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But then it happened again. It displayed another item that we'd been talking about only a few minutes prior.

Today, I read an article here: -->click<-- that kind of underscores the fact that nothing you do on the internet is private.

Only dell would CHARGE $6 to NOT put a bezel on a server.

This is pretty cool, a knee brace that generates enough power to charge 10 cell phones.

I can't imagine strapping 10 cell phones to my belt and plugging them into my knee... but if I had this knee brace, and ever needed to, I could!

-->click<--