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Everybody agrees that when it comes to passwords, bigger is better. After all, one of the best ways to frustrate a brute-force attack is to increase geometrically the number of combinations of characters that are necessary. Add to this all the other safeguards that are included in any robust password protection scheme—upper- and lower case alphabetic characters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks, no dictionary words, etc.—and you've gone a long way toward keeping your accounts secure. The flip side of that, of course, is the impossibility of remembering dozens of unique 40-character passwords for all of your financial- and other accounts.

LastPass is an online password manager. All you need to remember is your password to get into LastPass, and everything else can be as complicated—and safe—as you want. Along with passwords, it also remembers all that other fill-in-the-blank stuff you need to speed-up the process of entering your information into web forms: name, address, credit card numbers, the whole thing.

It's available as a desktop app for Windows, or as a plugin for your Windows, Mac, or Linux web browser.

Download LastPass

Microsoft Windows is a handy place to live. It's widely available, everybody writes apps for it, and there is a lot of support available out there. That's all good. But there is a darker side to the O/S from Redmond as well.

Your system likes to keep track of where you've been, and what you've produced. Your Word and Excel documents can be traced back to you. Your web browsing history is no secret. Indeed, there are a whole host of possible security issues that come along with Windows. Maybe it's time to see what you can do to tighten up your security.

How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy is a free downloadable e-book. In simple and straightforward terms, the author explains what kinds of security threats you should guard against on your computer and small office/home office network. There are recommendations for no-cost online tools you can use, and free software you can install on your system that can help to tighten up the security of your system and make your computing safer.

How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy is a free download. You'll need to have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 5 or later) to read the e-book.

Download How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy E-book

Everything's got a password. Online bank accounts. Online mail accounts. Editing your blog. Logging in to your network at work. That's a lot of accounts, and that means a lot of passwords.

Now you can avoid having to remember a bunch of login information if you always use the same short passwords that are based on dictionary words or easily knowable personal facts about yourself, or if you always write them down on sticky notes and hang them on your monitor. Of course, with that approach, you can also forget about keeping your money, identity, work product, and everything else that those passwords are supposed to protect. If you really want to keep things safe, you should use long, complicated, impossible-to-remember passwords, and change them regularly. Good luck keeping track of all that.

Password Gorilla may be the tool you've been looking for. A cross platform app for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and more, it helps you to use passwords the way they were intended. Now instead of having to remember a whole brain-full of passwords, you can store account names, passwords, URLs, notes, and more in Password Gorilla's encrypted database. Now you only have to remember one password, and everything else is safe and sound behind it. If you're feeling particularly uninspired, it will help you generate serious passwords that nobody is likely to crack in this (or several more) lifetimes.

Password Gorilla is a free download.

Download Password Gorilla

It's a rough world out there, and there are all kinds of folks who would like nothing better than for your computer to die a slow, lingering death, or to help themselves to your private data, or to use your machine to wreak havoc across the Internet. Whether it's a virus, worm, Trojan, or some other diabolical app, they're out to get you. The best line of defense is to have strong antivirus protection on your system.

You can spend a fortune on antivirus tools, but you don't have to. The folks at Avira offer one solution that costs nothing: Avira AntiVir Personal. Free for personal use, this application protects your system against viruses and more, including many rootkits, designed to take your system over for use in denial of service attacks, email spamming operations, and more.

Avira AntiVir Personal is a free download for use on a single computer. It runs under Windows 2000 and later, in both 32- and 64-bit versions, and is available for Linux and other UNIX-like systems as well.

Download Avira AntiVir Personal

Could there be anything more horrible than the loss of your laptop computer? Well, yes, I suppose so, but it's certainly pretty high up on the list. Whether you misplaced your machine, or somebody decided to acquire it via "five finger discount", now you're here and your baby's somewhere else. If you'd like to be reunited, it would be a good idea to have installed Adeona on your machine before it goes missing.

Adeona, named after the Roman goddess of "safe returns", is a free, open source tool that lets you track your laptop or any other computer. Unlike proprietary solutions, you don't have to rely on a server somewhere keeping track of the whereabouts of your machine—meaning they could keep track of where you go, as well as where any potential thief may go with your system. Adeona "phones home" about every half hour, but not on an exact schedule, making it a little tricker to detect its use. It reports back a wealth of information about your missing computer: IP address, nearby routers, wireless hotspots currently in use. The Mac version can even use your built-in camera to snap a photo of the thief.

It's important to remember that while Adeona can help you locate your missing computer, and perhaps even implicate the thief, that you should then report this information to law enforcement or other appropriate authorities and not try to effect a recovery yourself.

A free download, Adeona is available for Linux, OS X (10.4+), and Windows (XP+) users.

Download Adeona

A simple password is an ineffective password. A single password that you use for multiple purposes is a risky password. By the time you cover all the bases—complex, mixed upper- and lower case, alphanumeric and punctuation marks, no dictionary words—you've got a list of great passwords, but alas now you can't remember any of them. You need a "password locker" tool to keep track of them all. That's fine, as long as you always sit at the same desk with the same machine. What if you're out and about and need one of your passwords? Now you're in trouble. Enter Passpack.

Passpack is an online password manager tool. You can enter up to 100 entries for free, and they don't have to be just passwords. Save emergency info, travel info, confirmation numbers, all that sort of thing. The one thing they do ask is that you not store financial information here. Should everything go south, it's one thing if somebody can log into your blog; it's a totally different matter if they should log into your bank account and clean you out.

For most purposes, Passpack should give you plenty of security for your data. You always connect via secure HTTPS connections, and your data is super-encrypted as it sits on their servers. They've even got "disposable log-ins" for use on public computers. Pretty cool.

Passpack is a free service, and should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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How many passwords and logins do you have to keep track of? Work, home, banking, various online accounts—it's probably anywhere from several to dozens. If you're using reasonable passwords for these accounts—long, a mix of characters, no dictionary words, and different passwords for each account—then it's going to be just about impossible to remember them all. While a bunch of Post-Its stuck on your monitor may be the standard way to save a list like this, it's not really the preferred way. There's just not much security when your passwords scream "Free! Take one!" to anybody who happens to walk by.

Password Safe is an application that lets you keep track of all those passwords, and keeps everybody else out of them. With Password Safe, all you have to do is remember one password, and now all the rest of them are safely tucked away for you. You can choose to store all your information in one database, or you can use multiple ones—one for work, one for home, one for shopping, etc.

Password Safe is available for Windows, and also in a Java version that will run on Linux and Mac machines as well.

Download Password Safe

How secure do your need your system to be? How about so secure that you can't even see there is a system there? That's one of the options with TrueCrypt.

You can encrypt an entire disk partition or storage device, making the entire contents of that volume unintelligible. Beyond that, you can even make that encrypted volume "invisible", so that it cannot even be found through normal means on the system. Taking that to the extreme, you can even, with a little sleight-of-hand, encrypt your windows boot partition, essentially hiding your entire system. Now that's secure!

An obvious use for the functionality that TrueCrypt provides is to make sure your USB drives are perfectly safe to have and move around. If you should happen to misplace a drive protected with this tool, there is no way the data on that volume can ever be retrieved. That's the kind of insurance we can all enjoy.

TrueCrypt is available for both Linux (kernel 2.6.5 or compatible) and Windows (Win 2000 and later, including 64-bit versions).

Download TrueCrypt

There are a lot of anti-virus solutions available out there. Unfortunately, they're expensive and they require a fair amount of horsepower to run them on your computer. It seems like a combination of low price, thrifty use of resources, and frequent updates might be just the ticket.

AVG Anti-Virus is a free solution for non-commercial home use. It isn't a resource hog, so your system won't get bogged-down while you protect yourself from nasties. With regular updates pushed to your system, you'll always be prepared for the worst that the Internet has to offer. AVG is constantly on the lookout for problems in real-time with its Resident Shield, keeping an eye on files as they open and applications as they run. The Virus Vault quarantines infected files, keeping them from wreaking havoc on your system. Email scanning keeps an eye on attachments that come along with your messages.

The Free Edition of AVG Anti-Virus is available for Windows (Win95 and later), and some flavors of Linux.

Download AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

We love what the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation does — defending Americans’ rights in the digital age — and have supported them for ages. (And encourage you to do so also.) We also love Tor, a free system for online privacy created by the EFF. Tor helps “anonymize” your web browsing and other online activity, bouncing your traffic around the Internet rather than letting it take a direct route. This “covers your tracks” so curious webmasters, online advertising companies, and just plain sneaky folk can’t tell where the data came from or where it's going. The nifty part is: the more people that use Tor, the better protection of anonymity it provides for everyone who uses it.

Get Tor