The Blog of Pornographicus

I hate to put up so many text posts in a row after having just gone through an unexpected two weeks of not being able to be “Porn O’Graphicus.” However, I have seen so many people over the past few days that have had their Tumblr, Twitter, and other accounts compromised and hijacked lately that I really want to make people aware of an easy way to almost completely avoid this problem

These days, the old passwords of yore simply will not cut it. Even more important is to have a different password for every online account. Everybody needs truly random passwords. The problem is, how to remember them all? The answer is, a good password manager.

The one I use is a relatively obscure program called Password Gorilla. The main reason I like it (besides being free and open-source) is that it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The file into which all of your password and other login information is stored can be copied from computer to computer, even under different operating systems, and it will work on all of them. It can even be placed on a thumb drive.

With this or any other password manager, only one password has to be remembered. The rest — automatically-generated, complete jibberish passwords — are then just a mere copy-and-paste away from use.

Whether one chooses to try Password Gorilla or seek out the many other alternatives out there, I must stress this again…using passwords with common words (even ones written in “leetspeak”), short passwords, or repeating a password on other accounts is just asking for trouble. Make the Internet more secure for yourself and all of us by using a password manager.

While any password manager is better than using “boobs69” everywhere from Facebook to you bank account, I do recommend staying away from any such program that stores passwords in “the cloud.” If something is kept online for any length of time, it is vulnerable. Only use a password manager that keeps your encrypted password file on your own computer or storage drive.