Love them or hate them we have to live with them.
By C.D. Hersh
Our lives have come down to
passwords. If you can’t remember them you can’t get into any of your social
media applications. You can’t pay your bills or access your email and in some
cases your smart phone.
Google “passwords” and you get 41M plus hits that encompass anything from password managers to safes to recovery programs and generators. Passwords are big business and if you don’t have them, as mentioned above, you have problems.
Protection has always been of importance even to the early cave dwellers. If your cave wasn’t high up a cliff anyone could just walk in and take the meat you had killed the day before. As time progressed man became smarter about keeping things safe. Today to keep things safe we have whole home systems that monitor 24/7. However, that still doesn’t cover the ones you need when you want to tweet or get money out of the ATM.
One solution is to spend big bucks for a password generator and then have a password keeper to store the various passwords you have to maintain. Here is a simple password generator and keeper that only costs a dollar per password.
You say that can’t be.
Pull out a George Washington from your purse or wallet. Take a close look at the bill. You can use any denomination but to keep costs down George is the one to go with. Notice the ten digit serial number? That’s the password generator.
There are two ways to use this generator. One is to use the numbers printed on the bill. Which might not be as secure as the method we’ll explain next. Of course, with systems today you have to use more than numbers and sometimes even special characters. We’ll get to those in a minute.
To generate the letters from the serial number start with the first letter of the serial number. If the next number is an even number, move forward in the alphabet that many letters and use it as a capital. If the number is odd move backwards and use it as lower case. When the number is zero use the same letter, you just used only different case. Do this for each successive number and you will have a string of randomized letters, ten characters long.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
For example, if the serial number on your bill is K94785309C you come up with the ten characters as KbFyGbyYpC. When you get to A or Z you continue at the beginning or end to continue your count. Your random password is now generated.
If the serial number is E54522034B then you get E@z#D$y&ACCzDB. Once the special characters are used, don’t repeat them again in that password. Mix in other special characters that are allowed, as you desire.
What about the password keeper you ask? That’s the dollar bill you used to generate the password. Use a post-it-note to put the name of the social media or other account name on the bill. Put it in a second wallet in a secure place until it is time to update your password on that account. That dollar is not spendable for you and is why this all costs a dollar per account.
Of course, once you have all your account passwords set up, the next time you update your password is free as you change the dollars out. Hope this is helpful to you.
Let us know if this works for you or you have another idea in the comments below.
If this piques your interest, then the links for our books are on our Amazon Author Page
Putting words and stories on paper is second nature to co-authors C.D. Hersh. They’ve written separately since they were teenagers and discovered their unique, collaborative abilities in the mid-90s. As high school sweethearts and husband and wife, Catherine and Donald believe in true love and happily ever after. 
Good God! I'll just stick to using my imagination to create passwords. This is not my parents world, that's for sure. Great and eye-opening post, C.D.! All the best in all your publishing ventures! Cheers!
ReplyDeleteImagination is the basis for strong passwords. Just don’t be predictable.
ReplyDelete