Sometimes when I’m working on web-based projects, I’m given clients’ passwords for web hosting, website logins, emails, and sites like mailchimp.com. Many of these passwords are frighteningly insecure; a lot of them could be guessed within 3 or 4 tries.
The most common password I’ve seen, by far, is “yourname1″ (e.g. “emdash1″). I’ve seen this 3 or 4 times now, or variations thereof (e.g. “yourbusinessname1″). Often when signing up for a web service, you’re told you have to use a number in your password… hence, people tack a 1 onto the most easily-guessed password of all.
If you’re using this password formula, stop right now! Develop your own secure password.
A good password has upper and lowercase letters, some numbers, and even some punctuation (though some sites still use letters and numbers only.) While emdash1 is a terrible password, something like 3dmAw54u! is a far better one.
“But Em Dash,” you say, “I’ll never remember something like that!”
Here’s where I use a formula when devising passwords. Come up with a phrase in English. Mine was “Em Dash makes awesome websites for you!” Now take the first letters of each word. EDMAWSFY*. Can any of those words be letters instead to simplify, as per a Twitter trending topic? (Yes, in my case, “for” can become “4″, and “you” can become “u”.) Now we’re at EDMAWS4U. Next, substitute letters for numbers (à la leetspeak) for a couple characters. Alternate lower and uppercase, add some punctuation, and you’ve got “3dmAw54u!” for a password. Bonus: you can remember it easily, by remembering your special phrase.
You can also take a word without an easy English equivalent (a name, a place, or a nonsense phrase from your childhood) and add leetspeak and alternating case. For example, Nazookitty becomes nAzo0-k1tTy.
Change your passwords once every couple of months.
*Yes, I know, I split “websites” into two words. Bad Em Dash.
No more IE6.
Posted on December 19th, 2010 by emdash in Opinion, TutorialsFor the last few web development projects I have worked on, I have become fed up with supporting Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I start off with good intentions and attempt to make my layout work in that horrid excuse of a web browser, but after hours of frustration, decide it isn’t worth the effort – or my clients’ time and money.
Most popular, new-ish websites have limited functionality in IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is now over 6 years old; its last upgrade was in 2004 (source). Google, Facebook and Youtube have all announced they will stop supporting IE6.
Internet Explorer 6 is obsolete. It is okay to have a website that doesn’t support it.
Internet Explorer 6 is full of security holes and improper support for web standards – this is why web developers hate it. Unfortunately, people are inherently lazy with updating their computer’s software, and many non-internet-savvy people are still using the thing. You’ve gotta do something for these poor sods, even though they’re likely not your target market. (Such people tend to distrust shopping online, for example, and won’t shop from an e-commerce website.)
(Note: there’s also people on Windows 2000 at work – these unfortunate souls are forced to use Internet Explorer 6. Again, they’re probably not sticking their credit card number on a webpage at work. Since they soon can’t view YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Google in the office, they’ll probably either look for a new job or we’ll see a mass productivity increase.)
So, what’s the solution for the 5% of the internet’s users, that clings to IE6 like a barnacle to a sinking ship? Enter conditional comments.
Put this at the top of your webpage after the <body> tag:
<div id=”IE6warning”>
<p style=”font-size: 13px”><strong>We’ve noticed you appear to be using an older version of Internet Explorer.<br /> To properly view this and other websites, we recommend you <a href=”http://www.ie8optimized.com/” target=”_blank”>update your web browser now</a>.</strong></p>
</div>
<![endif]–>
and style your IE6warning box using CSS to make it pretty. If you want to be sneaky about it, you can make it look like a browser warning along the top of the page.
If the user is running IE6 or (God forbid) IE5.5, they’ll see the warning. Other browsers treat the section like a comment and ignore the enclosed HTML.