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How to Create an Unbreakable Password
August 22, 2012
How to remember all the passcodes for our many digital accounts?
Here’s a nifty way to create a complex, almost uncrackable passcode (hat tip to Michael Dobson and his amazing Sidewise Thinking blog) you can remember.
Start by taking a line from your favorite poem, play, novel or TV show.
It could be, say, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players . . .”
Then construct a password out of the first letters of each word:
Atwasaatmawmp
You might associate with it an easy-to-remember set of numbers, say Shakespeare’s birthday and date of death—April 24, 1564 and April 23, 1616. But reverse the numbers, date of death first, and date of birth last.
So now you have a passcode:
4231616Atwasaatmawmp4241564
Or take the recent memorable line from AMC’s Breaking Bad:
“Jesse, you asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.”
That now becomes:
JyamiIwitmbotmbnIiteb
Add to that the birthdate of Breaking Bad’s actor Bryan Cranston, March 7, 1956—but you might break up the date and reverse the year of his birth. Now you have a passcode:
37JyamiIwitmbotmbnIiteb6591
As you enjoy Shakespeare or Breaking Bad, just pick up the memorable lines and favorite actors and turn them into memorable passcodes. Just remember to keep track of the set of rules you apply to the numbers.
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