Well, this was eye-opening… 👀
This is one of the rare occasions where I felt it necessary to share this information with my audience. So here we go.
First, I want to give a HUGE shout-out to a guy I follow on Telegram who is helping the public-at-large break away from the spying of the big tech companies. He teaches people how to fork their devices into spyware free (and I do mean free) operating systems and open-source software. His name is Jeffrey Peterson, and if you don’t follow him, you should.
Secondly, I had an old laptop sitting in my office awaiting recycling for years, so what did I have to lose if I completely broke the device? Not a darn thing. The most it would do at that time is boot up – anything else caused it to freeze. I decided to work on it and forked it into an Ubuntu Linux OS. Holy Hanna – what resulted was so impressive I couldn’t believe it. It went from taking 10 – 15 minutes to boot up to mere milliseconds. It. Was. SHOCKING!! đź‘€ It went from a potential boat anchor to BETTER than a new laptop. No spyware, and so clean the speed was (and still is) I-N-S-A-N-E!!!!
Now, to the real reason I am writing this…
PASSWORD MANAGEMENT
Password management is a subject that most people fail to understand its importance. I hope it will help those out there who use those same three passwords repeatedly, thinking it’s secure. Who could guess it after all? I’m not judging. I was one of them for a lot of years. I had to have a password that I could remember. And oh… if I use the SAME password and then take the initials of the organization and tack that on the end, surely THAT was secure (or so I thought) … Take a look at the table below:
If this doesn’t scare the b’geezuz outta you, you’re impervious to the pitfalls of tech, and you can stop reading here – no matter what I write or say, you won’t listen anyway. Feel free to move on.
But for those of you who have had a tech revelation, there’s help out there for this kind of thing, and we’re gonna dig into it.
ALL of the passwords that I use are 13 characters or more and involve letters (upper and lowercase), numbers, and special characters (if allowed.) ALL OF THEM (in the hundreds or maybe even thousands by now.) And none are repeated. How do I know there are no repeats? How do I remember all of them? How do I know if they are on a hacked list?
I don’t gain anything by promoting them other than happier clients and less frustration for everyone. It is incredible how many folks contact me asking me their password to things I don’t manage for them. My best advice – if you don’t use a password manager, it’s time to start. Tech is only getting more intelligent, and let’s face it, we can’t opt out anymore. If you have a bank account, you’re online. If you have a credit card, you’re online. If you have ever been to the doctor… YOU’RE ONLINE. I could go on, and on, and on. Be smart about it; that’s all I’m saying. Protect yourself.
Until next time…
Be Safe & Well.