Passwords

So I am not going to mention seasons or time of year! 

Since I started this blog the weather has taken a real turn. So I am going to stay well away from the subject and concentrate on technical issues, which I know more about.
 
Passwords - Now there is a subject.

It was brought home to me yesterday that the Lamas Design and Technology equipment is now at a point that there need to be some seriously strict controls in place.  My little girl, who takes credit for the M in lamas, asked me a question that her daddy had text to me the night before and we had had no discussion since so the only place she could have acquired this information was from my mobile phone.  Both myself and my husband looked at each other and realised that this was now an issue like the TV.  She is savvy enough to work the TV and is able to find her films from the server.  This is ok but I really don’t want her watching inappropriate films, so we put a pin lock on the TV so she cannot get into it without my knowledge or when The Adults are sleeping.   Not that we have anything really horrendous but the language and violence in some films is hardly suitable for a 6 year old.

So the mobile phones and tablets in the Lamas household are now all protected.  Simple enough to do.  Their use of the PC has been restricted via the OS since they started using it.  Age restricted and use time restricted and YouTube is just NOT ALLOWED!

This is for the time being all good but...my children are both quite tech savvy (not amazing considering both their parents do some form of IT for a living!) and it will probably not be very long until the phones and the TV have to have the passwords changed because they saw me enter the pin or they manage to work it out for themselves.

So this brings me back to passwords.  We have to have them for pretty much everything these days.  PIN for the ATM, Passwords for work accounts, login and emails, home emails, anything you buy online needs a password to set up an account and also when you pay for something with visa.  Am I the only one that gets an error almost every time from the Verified by Visa site?  I think I have changed that damn password every time I have used it.

It is tempting to use the same one for everything for the simple fact that you have to remember them all as writing it down somewhere is just not recommended.

Sorry but that just does not work for me!

I don’t use the same password for everything however I pick a theme for my passwords and pick words that relate.  This does make remembering them a bit easier.  Also what makes it even easier is getting an old style paper A-Z phone book and keeping a record of the site and email address used and the password.
Use numbers in your password.  I’m not just talking about slapping a number on the end more using numbers in the middle.  For example: instead of using the password manunited change it to M4nUn1ted.  
For the record, I don’t follow football!

Change them regularly, which is a pain I know, especially when there is more than one device that logs you in to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and so on.  

It’s your online security so isn’t it worth the trouble?