> La"Working for a campus paper, I have the least right of anyone to be a snob about this sort of thing"Zorra

Oh no, it was awful. I read it for two seconds, thought, "I hope nobody paid this person to put pen to paper," and then figured out what the deal was.

As it stands, I'm pretty happy with my password solution. I use a program called Password Safe to store all of my important passwords, e.g. banks, credit cards, etc. All of those are unique, strong passwords (random strings of mixed case alphanumeric characters).

Password Safe encrypts the file it saves my passwords in, and the key to that file is a very long pass phrase (think on the order of a sentence or two, containing mixed case and punctuation) that would be basically unbreakable by any sort of brute force attack.

When I need to use one of the sites, I open Password Safe, enter my long passphrase, and copy/paste the password. I can keep a backup of the Password Safe file, and as long as I don't lose my pass phrase, I'm pretty secure (if I lose the pass phrase and/or the file, I'm totally hosed though, since I don't have any clue what any of those passwords are).

For other sites, whose security is less important, I don't bother with unique passwords. If somebody hacks my Rink Chat account, it's annoying but not a big loss, so I don't need to protect the password too strongly. The important thing is that getting my Rink Chat password doesn't get you my Citibank password. This way I don't have to go through the hassle of opening Password Safe and typing my long password every time I want to log into Rink Chat.

If sites have particularly insane password regulations, I just store their passwords in the safe.

Stephen