How do you manage your passwords

[chevy]

I recently read in a newspaper several considerations about passwords.

The first one was a provocative remark: most company forbid users to write down their passwords... the result is that people select very simple passwords, and often only one single password for all their accounts. This significantly lowers the security of the system.

The article then gave hints on how to choose "good passwords": have a safe and difficult to guess root, and then add an account specific element.
Like (simplified): gT#3rO as root
and %gm for google mail, %mx for macosx.com, %ht for hotmail, ...
Example: gT#3rO%gm, gT#3rO%mx, gT#3rO%ht

It makes it easy to remember and difficult to guess.

Do you have something similar ? Any comments ?

[Damrod]

At work we use a lot of pass phrases. Example:

The weather is good to work on Servers today!

would become

TwigtwoSt! or Twig2woSt!

As long as you can remember the phrase, you can reconstruct the password. Not all of our used passwords are save though, and we definately need to change them. A lot of them were hacked with Jack the Ripper (a password cracking tool) within minutes...

I personally look forward to the mobile app "MobileSitter". It's a password wallet for Cell Phones. The nifty thing about it is, that you do not get a failure message when entering the wrong wallet code. it generates random passwords and through this, someone going through my mobile to get passwords wont know if the results are the true or false ones. It's not out yet though...

[fryke]

I just use one password for everything. It's "10010101". Works perfectly, and I never forget it.

[Satcomer]

Users of OS X at home and are paranoid could use the shareware program 1Passwd.

[rwilkerson]

I use 1Passwd and KeePassX. Both quite good, while 1Passwd excels for online passwords. A great click-saver when coupled with AllBookmarks.

[artov]

I use a simple password for services that need some, but I do not care about
security. For others I have three passwords (the original was kind of based
on my watch, others are generated from it). I have Handy Safe on my
Sony-Ericsson P990i where I keep all the other passwords (those that
some service has generated the password for me).

[ScottW]

I use PCMacPassword... it works on Mac, Windows and Linux. Has a portable version for thumb drives and syncs with your primary system. Very cool app. As for Mac apps... it's a little windows like... but been using it over 2-3 years now and no issues what-so-ever.

[Ferdinand]

Is that a freeware app, if not, what did you pay for it?