• An “interactive brute force search space calculator” for passwords, which you can play with to get a good idea how easily a brute-force attack would find YOUR passwords.

• Some comments further down the page on mathematical entropy, and how it doesn’t affect password strength (despite common wisdom on the subject) nearly as much as pure password length.

• A description of a “password padding” system that looks like it would generate strong and remember-able passwords.

I have reason to know the math for this kind of thing myself, and it all looks pretty accurate. Of course, a “password safe” with truly random passwords (and a really good backup system) is the best way to go these days, hands down, but there will always be a few passwords that you’ll need to keep in your wetware.

Scary stuff, but ooh so exciting, too.

Memory training is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. I really think that schools should have one mandatory class every year devoted to it. Of course, it’ll never happen… any kid who masters even the basics of a memory systems has a killer advantage in our current school system, because more than 95% of testing simply checks whether you can regurgitate facts on command. And can you imagine what would happen if every kid could do that, perfectly, almost every time?! Schools would have to re-work their system to actually test for understanding! The horror!

In the mean time, a few parents will quietly continue to teach their kids how to use memory systems at home. Those kids will be fully capable of bringing home A+ report cards on almost any subject with a minimum of effort, while equally intelligent classmates will put in several times more work and pull lower grades for it.

I detest inefficiency. Schools could be so much more than just government-run part-time babysitters-slash-prisons. If the goal is learning, start by teaching the kids how to learn efficiently! If it’s just keeping them out of trouble for a few hours each day, be honest and admit that… and continue to watch helplessly as cultures that haven’t screwed up their own education systems happily take the wealth and power that you’re handing over to them.

It has always struck me as curious that no one remembers anything from when they were really young. I have vivid memories from when I was six years old on, but only a handful from before that, most tied to strong emotions or discomfort, or (strangely enough) the layouts of the buildings and the neighborhoods I spent a lot of time in… I can still mentally walk through my grandmother’s house and garden, and the fascinating dusty old dirt-floored garage/shed behind their house. And while I may not recall the furnishings, I could draw you a fairly accurate plan of all three floors of the house, the land it sat on, and the streets immediately surrounding it.

But the thing that prompted these musings is a study some Canadian scientists have done recently, suggesting that while adults rarely remember anything from before age three or four, young kids have verifiable memories as far back as when they were eighteen months old. Even more curious, when they were brought back a couple years later, they couldn’t recall those memories even when prompted.

In a very real way, we are our memories, and it will be very interesting to see what else science can figure out about how the memory system works.

(The URL is from the lyrics of the Statler Brothers’ song “Do Your Remember These,” which is almost as old as I am.)

I’d used those tricks to remember the combination to a lock that I’d put on our shed, maybe six or seven years ago. The lock was on there for less than a year; I quickly discovered that it froze up in the winter, which made getting to our snow-removal equipment interesting. I replaced it, tossed it into a drawer, and haven’t looked at it since.

As some of you know, we bought a second place, moved into it, and tried renting out the first. About a month ago, that experiment ended as a minor disaster, and we decided to sell the place instead. We’re cleaning it up now, in preparation for putting it on the market, and we’ve had to store a lawnmower there to keep the lawn looking neat while it’s for sale, so of course we wanted to lock up the shed again. I immediately thought of that old lock. But I hadn’t written the combination down anywhere. Could I remember it, after all this time?

I could, and did. I remembered the visual mnemonic that I’d created for it by visualizing the shed itself (which was part of it), and was able to extract the three numbers from its elements, in almost the right order (I swapped the first and second numbers initially). Amazing… I’d used that combination no more than fifteen times total, the last of which was more than five years ago. Even with my fairly good memory of numbers from my programming work, I would never have recalled it without those memory tricks.

So it passed the test, confirming its usefulness and saving me the cost of a new lock. Not too shabby.

(Interesting idea, though not as convenient as simply learning to remember secure passwords.)

There’s also another article by the same people that’s just as interesting, on the interaction of genetic disposition and environment in producing behaviors.

*Cuss words were very popular. Boy, there’s a lot of aggression out there. *I was surprised about how many Christian-sounding — for example, “Ilovejesus” — log-on names were associated with the worst cuss words.

Just a thought, but if you’re really trying to live a clean life, try using a random password generator/database instead, or learn ways to remember random passwords.

Q: How do you remember all of your passwords?

A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security applications. There are several Web sites where I pay for access, and I have the same password for all of them. Two, I write my passwords down. There’s this rampant myth that you shouldn’t write your passwords down. My advice is exactly the opposite. We already know how to secure small bits of paper. Write your passwords down on a small bit of paper, and put it with all of your other valuable small bits of paper: in your wallet. And three, I store my passwords in a program I designed called Password Safe. It’s is a small application — Windows only, sorry — that encrypts and secures all your passwords.

I use KeePassX for the same thing, just in case, but I need certain passwords so often that I’ve learned how to memorize them. I’m surprised that Mr. Schneier hasn’t done the same.