People are so lazy the don't want to enter passwords no less take the time to think up a good one. I am one of these people. But just because I don't want to doesn't mean that I didn't. More important than my lasiness - security. I do not want to fall in the the group of people that got thier e-mail hacked because they used a password like dog, cat, house or something equally lame.
Personally I have a few hundred passwords... I mean a different password for every email address, account, credit card, ect. and I never have to look one up... never even have to think hard about it. In fact I can tell my passwords to someone and they wouldn't remember.
The best passwords are serialized passwords. Sounds complex but it doesn't have to be. You can serialize a password from as little as three elements. These three elements are things that mean something to you but would be hard for anyone else to put together... even if they spent all day doing it.
First - you need a base. The base is the first part of the password and is always the same... i.e. all passwords start with the same base. The base is made up of two elements. They could be anything... three letters from your license plate and three letters from your favorite color. Something that is really easy to remember. For examples sake I'm going to use the last three letters of my license plate LYX for the first part and my favorite color red. That would be LYX and RED or LYZRED. Looks cryptic already but I know my favorite color even how to spell it and for my license plate I only have to look at my car.
Before I finish the base... I'm going to digitize the second part. I am going to use the phone key pad and substitute the letters R, E and D with the numeric value on the keypad. R is 7, E is 3 and D is 3. So the second part of my base is now 733 whcih makes the whole base LYX733. Getting really cryptic now but real easy to remember.
The last part of the password is different making all passwords unique. This part is something about the entity the password is for. Something unique about that entity but must always be the same thing. That makes it easy to remember. For example all businesses have a unique name. So at Sears the password would be LYX733Sears. They also have a unique address... The corporate offices of Sears is 3333 Beaverly Road so the password would be LYX7333333BeaverlyRoad. That's a field full!
So having what seems to be a complex pass word is not really that hard. If you use only one password everywhere eventually your going to run accross a bad guy that can simply back track to places you've been an get your goods!
