Some time around 2006, I started thinking about my online passwords in a new way. Until this point, I had used a collection of perhaps a dozen gibberish passwords, which I reused on various sites depending on the sensitivity of the site. For example, my bank account would use a nearly unique password, whereas a random forum would use a very commonly reused password.

This worked acceptably well, but I frequently had to ask myself: “which password did I use when I signed up for this service?” In response to having to guess my own passwords, I made two decisions: I would start writing my passwords down, and I would make them all unique and randomly generated. Four years later, I am using a totally different system, and I’ll explain all of my reasoning.

Read on…

Yesterday, I  grabbed an 802.11b/g/* router from Chinatown ($32 – can’t beat that) and set out to use my laptop’s wireless network card.  I hadn’t done this before because I was (justifiably) concerned about wireless security, so I wanted to make sure that a breach of the wireless network wouldn’t turn into a breach of the wired LAN (which includes a printer and a few sensitive servers). This post collects some of my research and observations, and it concludes with my recommendations for how you can secure your own wireless network…  or at a minimum, it tells you how you could if you were willing to spend $32 on a new wireless access point.

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