Obviously, if you're reading this, you are on the internet. So many people are on the internet. There's a thousand useful services and websites all over the place, and we all use at least two or three. And many, if not most, of these services and websites require some kind of password authentication to access them.
Passwords are important, they allow you access while safeguarding your information. So, obviously, it's important to make passwords that are both reasonably secure against casual intrusion, and easy to remember. The latter becomes even more important when you have multiple passwords.
A lot of people like to use passwords with character substitution, perhaps a few nonsense words. And that works, usually, but they're hard to remember. So, here's how to simplify your passwords for both ease of use and increased complexity and security.
Use sentences. Proper sentences, with capitalization, spacing, and punctuation, as if you were writing for english class. I do this all the time. I have four email passwords, one for my electric company's payment website, my internet payment website, two for my tumblr accounts, one for my banking portal, one for coinbase, and one to pay my phone bill. They would be difficult to remember if they were 34Myn@meda73 or something. You know what an easy password to remember is?
"I like cheese."
It's reasonably complex, from a hacking perspective. 14 characters long. Uppercase letters. Lowercase letters. Special characters. Spaces to break it up. And you'll probably never forget that that was my password for something at some point, even if you forget what this article is about, what my user name was, etc. You'll always remember "someone used 'I like cheese.' as a password".
Look around you. In this modern world, I can assure you there are things written all around you. Your sentence doesn't have to be grammatically correct. The password field doesn't care. "Dr. Pepper: Established 1885." was another password I had. Make sure it has some punctuation in it. That one had two periods and a colon, and was twenty nine characters long. Capitalize the first letter, or the first letter of every word.
It doesn't even have to be english. Once, I was thinking up a new password, and I looked at my desk, and there was a water bottle with the spanish side of the label facing me.
"Aqua Pura, Sabor Perfecto." Twenty six characters long. Uppercase. Lowercase. Special characters. And if I ever forgot my password, just look at a water bottle. And no one else knew that I got my password off of a water bottle. You could have a stack of them on your desk, and no one would have a clue. If someone opens your desk drawer, or looks under your keyboard, and finds a sticky note that says "flyINGp1g5", they're probably going to be able to figure out what that is.
You don't have to choose between ease of use and security. Make good passwords.
