It generates a password for each site based on your master password, the site name, and a hashing algorithm. It guarantees upper and lower and numeric characters in every password (for those fussy sites).

Unlike Keeppass mentioned above, you don’t have to run a separate app, it’s a bookmarklet that’ll populate form fields for you automatically. Neat.

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Hopefully in the future OpenID will simplify things for us as it becomes more widely adopted.

This “one login to rule them all” approach seems to be gathering pace already as an option on many big sites, and there’s a Wordpress plugin for it too which you guys should check out: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/

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And then of course there are efforts like openID, if better adopted, would be a great solution to all the above problems

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First you generate a string of 6-10 alpha-numeric characters as your password ‘base’ - the same guidelines as usual apply (make it impossible to guess, etc etc). The trick with it is that for every site or account for which you need a password, you append part of that site’s name to your password base. For instance if I were signing up for twitter I could use my base (’password123′) and add the first 4 characters of the site, resulting in ‘password123twit’.

The nice result of this is that you have a unique password for every account without having to track or store all of them. As long as nobody else knows your password base or your system, it *should* be bulletproof.

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I gave up using 16 character passwords though and reduced the length of default passwords generated a bit. The reason being that it is frightening how many web sites have poor handling of passwords that prevent you from logging in next time you try. You haven’t lost your password; it’s in your database but just doesn’t work. Here’s what happens. You provide your long password and are told that it was accepted, but the field they use to store the password is shorter than the password supplied. The correct thing to do would be to notify you the password you selected is too long and some sites do that but many more simply truncate it so your password becomes the first n characters of what you thought it was. I have settled on a length that still allows for sufficiently complicated passwords but has largely done away with the problem of truncation.

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For all my Web 2.0 services I use impossibly complicated passwords up to 16 characters long (that KeePass generates for you).

Just copy-paste your password out when you need to login… simple!

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