tinkr.net

I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions. I think if you want to change something, just do it because you want to do it and whenever you want to do it. Who cares what the calendar says.

This year my goal is to change all my online passwords to something different, and impossible to guess. My current passwords are probably better than most people’s, but they aren’t perfect. I have three levels of passwords. I have really strong ones for banking stuff, somewhat strong one for other online stuff, and a crappy one for sites I don’t care about.

The problem with hard to guess passwords for every site is remembering them. You pretty much need a password manager. I have looked at a few in the past, but they weren’t good enough for me. I use many computers with many different browsers on a daily basis, and from time to time am on a family member’s computer. I needed a way to access my passwords anywhere, and I don’t want to have to bring a thumb drive with me everywhere I go (even though I pretty much do).

My solution? LastPass.com. LastPass stores your passwords in the cloud. They have extensions for pretty much every browser. You just have to sign up for an account, and install the extension. From there whenever you enter a password it saves it to your LastPass vault. Next time you go to the site it will auto fill your password. You just have to log into LastPass from the extension, and you can have all your passwords auto fill. I have it set to log off of LastPass when I close my browser to keep it more secure.

The cool part is if you are on someone else’s computer you just have to log into LastPass.com to get your passwords. You can even export your passwords. Just incase something happens to LastPass, I exported my passwords to a csv file and then uploaded then to Google Docs, and my Dropbox account.

LastPass is free unless you want mobile access. If you want to use it on your phone it’s only $1 a month. I’m not using it on my BlackBerry yet, but might soon. Who knew managing your passwords could be so much fun.