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To continue reading this story, enter your password now. If you do not have a password, please create one. It must contain a minimum of eight characters, including upper- and lower-case letters and one number. This is for your own good. Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank...

Granddaughter is at my house and wants to use her wireless computer at my house. It ask for my computer password but I have no ideal what it is. Where can I find it??

One problem that plagues all of our increasingly Web-based lives is the curse of online passwords. We have to use them for everything from e-mail and Netflix to accessing credit card statements and other financial information. How do you actually keep track of all those bizarre combinations of letters and numbers we're forced to come up with every day? Multiple Passwords Having one user name and password for all the sites you access is a very bad idea, as is making your password any word that can be found in the dictionary, Omar Gallaga, who covers technology culture for the...

A man who chose "Lloyds is pants" as his telephone banking password said he found it had been changed by a member of staff to "no it's not".Steve Jetley, from Shrewsbury, said he chose the password after falling out with Lloyds TSB over insurance that came free with an account. He said he was then banned from changing it back or to another password of "Barclays is better".

Safety catches do not always prevent firearm accidents and even newfangled biometric guns, which check the identity of a user by their fingerprint, cannot stop thieves from using stolen ammunition in other weapons. The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle of Germany, is to password-protect the ammunition itself. Meyerle is patenting a design for a modified cartridge that would be fired by a burst of high-frequency radio energy. But the energy would only ignite the charge if a solid-state switch within the cartridge had been activated. This would only happen if a password entered into the gun...

A trio of entrepreneurial hackers hope to do for the business of password cracking what Google did for search and, in the process, may remove the last vestiges of security from many password systems. Over the past two years, three security enthusiasts from the United States and Europe set a host of computers to the task of creating eleven enormous tables of data that can be used to look up common passwords. The tables - totaling 500GB - form the core data of a technique known as rainbow cracking, which uses vast dictionaries of data to let anyone reverse the...

Security vendor VeriSign found 66 percent would choose to give up their passwords for a Starbucks coffee, during an informal on-the-street survey conducted Thursday in San Francisco. In an era of increased security concerns over protecting personal and corporate data, it's surprising to see that a cup of java can go a long way. An offer of World Cup tickets, well, that's another matter. "A lot of people are still unaware of how this information can be used across the network and don't understand the implications," said Mark Griffiths, VeriSign marketing director for authentication services. "We're trying to educate the...

This German article is translated to English. Harald Bögeholz At Your Disservice How ATA security functions jeopardize your data With most notebooks it is possible to secure the hard disk against unauthorized access with the aid of a password. Without the latter the disk, even when inserted into another computer, won't divulge its data. In the meantime this security function has become a feature of all 3.5" ATA hard disks and can hence be used - and abused - on desktop PCs! One morning the screen stays blank - disk boot failure, insert system disk and press Enter. Could it...

The Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1104035110442) in an update on the tsunami casualties today posted a link to a password-protected Thai government site listing all of the known names of the victims from Saturday’s tsunami, along with the password to access it. If you wish to locate the victims for a particular nationality, you can access them by following this link: (http://www.ems.narenthorn.thaigov.net/tsunami/login.php) and typing in “USER” for the username and “PASSWORD” for the password…without the quotation marks, of course. The site offers the option of listing the names by country of origin. This information should be of particular value to anyone with...

We use passwords stupidly. I was reading an article by one of my counterparts in the computer press, describing the security measures that users should take to protect their passwords. You know the drill: use different passwords for different sites. Change them regularly. Use a letter-and-number combination, not just letters. Don't use a common word, or your own name, or any common name, because all of these things are easily guessed by hackers using automated password-guessing software. Don't write your passwords down. And I said: Who has time for all of that nonsense? I mean, I had painful and difficult...

I like to play games sometimes at games.com. Some idiot was on there the other day acting like a jerk trying to send rude messages while the game was on. I basically told the idiot where to go and then he comes back and says he's going to mess up my password so I can't get back on the site using that screen name. I said whatever, muted the dude and that was that. I try to get back on the site with the same screen name and it won't work now!!Does anyone know how someone can mess up your...

Citrix Systems has released its single sign-on product, even as it prepares to debut an enhanced version of MetaFrame XP. The Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based company said Wednesday it has begun shipping Citrix MetaFrame Password Manager, priced at $179 per user. MetaFrame Password Manager, one of several products billed under the company's new MetaFrame Access Suite brand, was developed under the code name of Project Bimini. Once a user authenticates to a system using a single password, MetaFrame Password Manager automatically logs the user into any password-protected system while enforcing password policies. It also monitors all password-related events and can automate...

Dave Murphy, you would think, should know better. He is an information technology consultant - someone who counsels the rest of us on how to protect our computer, by making it difficult for someone to decipher passwords, for instance. Yet he keeps his four-digit bank card number in his wallet, and his various passwords are stored on a handheld computer that is always with him. At least, he says, the password database is encrypted and the note in his wallet is written in Chinese digits in Korean script. "Without my little crib sheet, I can't remember all that stuff," said...

Argh! I tried tonight to access my Roadrunner home page through the same FTP program I've used for months. No dice. Even though it worked fine 3 days ago. I get a "login incorrect" return as a result. I even went and changed the password at my page's management utility. I can login that way. I went and installed the FTP program on the host computer (mine is on the home network) just in case that was the problem. Nope. Still can't get a correct login, though I KNOW my password is correct (and remember, I tested it)! Is this...

Help! I lost the username/password for the news site. hildebeast (is the name or password I think) Can someone help?

VICTORIA, B.C. -- Police say they achieved a major breakthrough in a child pornography investigation because of help from U.S. computer investigators. Soeren Poulsen, a reserve police officer in Sequim, Wash., and a cohort spent several weeks cracking a password that led to hidden computer files containing hundreds of pictures and a video, Victoria police Sgt. Dave Mann said Tuesday. Backlogs at Canadian computer forensic offices, including Canada Customs and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, could have delayed the investigation by a year or more, Mann said. No charges had been filed as of late Tuesday. The case is tied...