I appreciate companies that not only focus on the development of their product but also embrace the entire concept around their product through education.

AgileBits, maker of 1Password, recently posted a great tutorial on making better master passwords. One of the many cool tidbits:

For those of us of a certain age and steeped in American culture, once we begin a list of names with ‘Larry…’ following it with ‘Moe and Curly’ is very predictable. So even though the ‘Moe & Curly’ add 11 characters to the password, those 11 characters are so predictable that they add very little actual strength. Even though it is shorter, using ‘I have 35 bats: Larry & Amy’ is actually stronger than ‘I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly’.

By the way, did you know your 1Password master password can contain spaces?

We live in an age when we can’t get enough education on password and data security. Maybe one day they’ll teach this stuff in schools. It wouldn’t be hard to free up some time: start by dropping useless curricula like cursive handwriting.1

  1. On the other hand, anything I write in cursive is naturally encrypted. I’ll keep thinking about this one. ↩