Creating a strong password is a fairly simple process that most people seem to skip over for the convenience of having an easy password to remember.  Now your password should be pretty easy for you to remember but it should be hard for someone to guess.  You should stay away from making your password something that can easily be found out about you such as your address or birthday.  Passwords are supposed to protect your information so it would be in your best interest to make you password something that someone can’t just type in because they know you and guess the correct password.   So here are a few things you should consider before making your password or changing your already existing password.

Use a combination of upper and lowercase letters in your password.  Thes should be spread out and not follow the normal way that grammar teaches us.  Put a capital letter in the middle or end of the word to spice things up.

Use numbers in your password as well.  You should put numbers in the middle of your password, not at the beginning or end.  This will make it more difficult for someone to guess whatever word you use for your password because the number in the middle will throw them off.

If the website you use allows it you should also put a symbol somewhere in your password.  Any symbol will do as long as it is allowed by the site.  These can be placed near the end of your password as an extra step in making sure you’ve got a strong password.

A good rule for strong password creation is to use numbers as letters and to add the letters of the website you’re using to ensure that you can remember what site each password is for.  You can use a similar password for each site you use, just make sure to change the letters relating to the site for each password.  For example, if you were to make a password for this site, you could do something like “t3Chn0logy!Ett” or “e@SyTecHt@lK”, notice how both passwords have upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols in them.

Also, you should make sure that you don’t keep your passwords with your login information written on post-its next to your monitor or keyboard.  That’s just making it too easy for someone to know all the information they need to get into your account.  If you are going to write the login and password on something, try to write them in random locations on the bill of the site you need them for, or write them in an address book under the letters of the website they correspond to.

Remember that your password should be easy for you to remember but hard for someone to guess.  If you are going to use something like a pet or car, try to mix up the letters so you password doesn’t resemble the original word.  You can check out this site for random password generation.Similar Posts:

• Interview with Frostwire Lead Dev
• Windows Key Shortcuts
• The Problem with Windows System Restore

• Passwords and their creation
• IP addresses are like your home address
• Avoid scams online by watching your URLs
• The most important keyboard shortcut that you should know
• Windows Key Shortcuts

When a blog makes its way up the rankings, it is usually due to a lot of content updating and multiple pages posted per week, but a static websites that don’t update daily or even at all face a problem when it comes to this issue.  SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) tell us that we are supposed to continually update our content and post new pages often to move up in the ranks, yet a site for a real estate company is not going to need to post new pages daily.  The site would have nothing to link to except for its own internal pages, and no outside site would really link back to it.  So how does this site actually make it up the SERPs (search engine results page)?

My philosophy would be that the site would have to employ some sort of blog that is of relevance to the business and attempt to update it often with information that users of the site would find helpful.  Simply adding a blog and filling it with garbage wouldn’t help the site at all.  But is that what all sites are supposed to do nowadays?  Why should a static site be hurt by a blog in the same category that only scratches the  surface of the topic.  A blog written by a real estate agent or investor shouldn’t outrank a static website offering real estate sales in the area.

It shouldn’t be this hard to rank for something that your site is about. Using a real estate site base in let’s say Carlsbad, CA as an example,  someone should be able to search for vacation rentals in Carlsbad, CA and have that site listed as one of the top sites, not a blog written by someone in Carlsbad who talks about vacation rentals.

Google’s pagerank system is what set them apart but I think it’s time that it goes through a small change that ranks blogs and website separately, keeping things fair for both types of sites.

• Creating Strong Passwords
• Videocast, Podcasts, and Webcasts oh my!
• Advertising on the internet is becoming viral and it’s spreading fast!
• Avoid scams online by watching your URLs
• HTML, what is it?

1. Having trouble reading the text on the page? Hold ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel down to increase the size of the font on in the current window.

2. Want to open a new tab? First you have to make sure that you have the tab bar visible. You can do this by going to Tools -> Options, then click on Tabs, and check the “Always show the tab bar” checkbox. Now anytime you want to open a new tab, you can double click on the tab bar and a new tab will open.

3. If you want to close a tab, click your mouse wheel on the tab and it’s closed.

4. To open multiple homepages when you launch Firefox, go to Tools -> Options, then click on the main tab, and in the homepage bar, simply type all the pages you want to open separated by the | character (shift + backslash)

5. You can also set keywords for your bookmarks so you don’t have to go searching through them every time. Go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks, then right click on any bookmark and select properties and you’ll see a new dialog box. Near the bottom there will be a text box that says keyword: All you do is enter the keyword you want associated with the bookmark and hit OK. Now anytime you want to go to that bookmark, all you do is type the keyword into the address bar and hit enter, and you’ll be taken to your bookmarked location.

So there you have it, just a few tips and tricks to make your internet browsing with Firefox quicker and easier.

If you don’t have Firefox, you can get it by clicking this link

• HTML, what is it?
• Avoid scams online by watching your URLs
• Closed Captions provided by…
• Addressing an issue
• Innovation is dead

Your anti virus on the other hand should be automatically running in the background, which is known as “resident” or “resident protection”. Even though the program is running on its own I still think it’s a good idea to run this at least once a month manually.

The key to both of these programs is that they are up to date.  Making sure your definitions are the most recent versions for both your anti virus and anti spyware programs is very important.  New viruses come out faster than the companies can write ways to stop them and if you’re not up to date, you’ll be on the fast track to a hard drive that been eaten by things like Sasser, and Trojans.  No not the one’s with Helen, although similar in the sense that they both carry things in them, these Trojans carry mean files that will attack your PC.

Keeping up to date is not very tough, you just have to make sure you are vigil and keep on top of it.  I opened both my anti spyware program only to find that I was over 100 days behind.  Yikes! I hit update as fast as I could because I don’t know what I would do if my computer fell victim to spyware and viruses.

Luckily my anti virus software automatically updates itself, but even this can’t be trusted, as there are viruses that will turn off your anti virus software’s ability to auto-update, and you’ll never know.  So it’s a good idea to update both anti virus and anti spyware programs within the same day.
So let this be a reminder to update your software regularly, and scan your PC at least once a week for spyware, and once a month for viruses to keep it running like new.

How often do you update and run your virus and spyware programs?

• Conficker Virus Removal
• Some helpful links to promote PC health
• 5 things anti-spyware software should do but doesn’t
• Local Computer Tech Support
• Defrag your hard drive to speed up your computer

If you look at the image below you will see a cut-out from AOL’s top news section with the first link highlighted (I don’t know why my cursor is missing from the screen shot, but you can see that the URL is underlined)

Since we know we are on AOL’s site, all the links should resemble a non suspicious looking URL containing AOL and some subpage from AOL, which you can see by simply holding your mouse cursor over the link in question.

Hold your mouse over this link and see what your browser shows as the location, it should be a link back to Easy Tech Talk’s homepage.

It’s amazing how simple this is and if everyone could get in the habit of doing this if they’re not sure of the link, then we would avoid Myspace hacks, email scams, viruses, and other nasty bad behavior on the internet.

When you hold your mouse over the link, its destination is shown at the bottom left of your browser, as seen in the picture below.

See how it say “news.aol.com”? That’s how you can tell it’s a legitimate link. If you see some crazy letters and numbers, or some other location other than AOL, then the link is bad and you shouldn’t click it, simple as that. The same goes for your email, you’ll be able to hold the cursor over the link in your email and see where the link leads to. If you for some reason don’t see the location in the browser, you can always right-click on it and select “Copy link location” (for firefox users) or “Copy shortcut” (for internet explorer users), then all you do is paste the link in the address bar at the top of your browser to see what it says, if the link looks good, the hit enter and you’re on your way. If you paste the link and it looks wrong, don’t go any further.

If you get an email saying your bank information is incorrect and you suspect it is a scam, go to the banks main site by typing it into your browser on your own, without clicking any links. Typing it in manually will guarantee that you are going to the site you want to. Each and every bank has a link to report fraud and you should forward the email to them, they will let you know if it is a scam and how to protect yourself.

That’s pretty much it, I hope this helps everyone out and if we can spread the word to everyone that doesn’t know this, everyone’s information will be safer and we’ll force these people running the scams to come up with other ways to try and get our info, but hopefully deter them enough to get out of the business and try something else.

[UPDATE 10-14-07 11:41pm PST] Click here to visit fakechecks.org, a website to help identify and avoid scams involving fake money orders or checks, which can be received online or through regular mail.

• Firefox tips and tricks
• HTML, what is it?
• Creating Strong Passwords
• Cache and cookies, two things we love in real life and hate on the internet.
• Pagerank issues