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Sensitive stuff. When you were a kid, your secret decoder ring—just send in three boxtops—was all the protection you needed to keep things private. Things have gotten a bit more complicated since then.

Locknote is a small, secure memo pad. Use it so protect any kind of information you want to keep private: passwords, account numbers, birthday lists, whatever. The executable is self-modifying, meaning that your data is actually incorporated into the program file itself. What this means is that you don't need any additional tool to get your data back—just fire up your data-and-program file, type in the password, and you're up and running. Save stuff for yourself, transfer it to a removable drive, or even send via email. You'll want to keep multiple copies for each type of information you're keeping track of. While it' s not a big-deal security suite, it does offer a quick-and-dirty way to protect data.

LockNote is a Windows application. You should be able to use it on systems running Windows 2000 and later.

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Everybody's got stuff that they want to keep private and secure. Maybe it's a list of passwords, or the winning numbers to next week's Lotto drawing, or maybe just some personal thoughts that you don't want your co-workers or kid sister to get hold of. There are all kinds of encryption programs out there to hide your stuff, but here's one where the program and the data become one.

Crypditor looks and acts like any old text editor—it's even got tabs to work on multiple items at once. You can just type straight into its editor window, or you can import text from other files. When you save the file, it just jams your now encrypted data into the executable itself. That means that not only is your private info private, but you can bring it with you—on a USB stick, as an email attachment—without having to bring along a separate tool to unlock it. Your data should be safe, since Crypditor uses 256-bit encryption. And it's even got a password strength tool, to help you decide whether you maybe want to use a password a bit more secure than "password".

Crypditor is a free download. It's a Windows app and should run under Win98 and later.

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You're only as secure as your password. Whether you're subscribing to a mailing list or doing online banking, you've got to have a password. For low-importance, low-risk applications, you can probably get away with using your pet's name, but you know you really shouldn't. And when it comes to serious stuff, well, you know you've got to have something good.

It's not easy to generate a really good password. They need to be long, include a bunch of different types of characters (upper- and lower case, digits, punctuation marks), not include any dictionary words, and be just as long as you can manage. Unfortunately it's hard to be that random on our own, and you know that Fluffy and Fido will end up with their names in there somewhere.

PassworG is a tool that can give you a hand with this. You can choose the type of characters to be used and the password length, and let the app generate them for you. It also checks the quality of the passwords you've generated, so you can use the baddest ones you can get your hands on. It spits a bunch of them out at once, so you can pick the ones you want to use, or use it to change passwords for all your secure stuff at once. And remember, save them somewhere, because these are good passwords, you're not going to be able to hack you way in if you forget them.

PassworG is a free download. It's a Windows application that runs on systems using Windows 2000 through Windows 7.

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No doubt about it: email is a handy way to move documents around. Attach a file, press SEND and your doc is headed where it needs to go. Unfortunately, anybody along the way can look at what you've sent, and that may not be what you had in mind. Upload your file to a website or some other online repository and you've got a similar problem. If somebody can find it, they can look at it.

Signature995 is a free tool that lets you encrypt your PDF files to hide their contents from prying eyes. Sure, you can do this with Adobe Acrobat as well, but it's going to cost you plenty, and if you're not cranking out PDFs for a living, it may be overkill. With Signature995, it's easy to password-protect your PDFs, as well as Microsoft Office files (DOC, XLS, and PPT), and even ZIP archive files. Encrypting your files is easy, and it's done non-destructively: it leaves the original in place as it creates the new encrypted version. Once everything's nicely tucked away, you can send your file without worrying who else is going to get their hands on it.

A free download, Signature995 is a Windows application. You'll also need to have Internet Explorer 6 or later installed on your system.

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In this litigious world, nothing is simple. There are rules for everything and warnings for everything else. "Be careful" the coffee cup warns us, "this cup of hot coffee is hot." Ya' think?

If you've ever bought shrinkwrapped software, or downloaded an app from a website, or even joined an online service, then you're familiar with the acronym "EULA", the dreaded End User License Agreement. It's that thing that you're supposed to read, but usually just blast on by on the way to using your new acquisition. Many of them are just a formality, reminding you that if the app blows up and eats your data (or your system) that it's not their fault. Others have a lot more meat. The ones that allow their publishers to put spyware on your system, for example, or to trap user info and data that you generate in conjunction with their use. Bet you wished you'd read that one, huh?

You know you really should read these things, but you just can't stand the thought. Maybe EULAlyzer can give you a hand. Run the agreement past this tool and it will point out items and conditions that are likely to be of interest to you. While they're not giving legal advice, what they are doing is looking for key terms and phrases that you probably want to pay attention to. Additionally, you can save your license agreements for future reference, if you ever want to double-check on specific terms.

EULAlyzer is a Windows app. It 's free for personal or educational use, and runs on systems using Windows 2000 up through Windows 7.

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Your hard drive is where all the "stuff" on your system lives. While the brains may arguably be the CPU and memory on your system—the places where the "thinking" happens—without the hard disk, it wouldn't have anything to think about.

When you're tooling around on your system, it's handy to have your hard drive, as well as any other permanent storage devices like USB sticks, network shares, optical media, and so on, show up in Windows Explorer. It's super easy to focus your attention on a particular drive by just clicking on its icon.

There may come a time, however, when you don't want this easy access. Suppose you share out one or more of your drives to other folks on the network. Or maybe your kids use the computer as well, and you'd just a soon have all your financial goodies hidden away, so nobody—accidentally or otherwise—gets into them or, heaven forbid, makes them go bye-bye. At times like this, it might be handy to just "disappear" your drives for a while.

NoDrives Manager lets you do just that. Basically it's a GUI front-end to some pretty gnarly manipulation of your system's Registry. Yeah, you could go in and tweak these all-important settings to hide- or reveal your hard drive, but you also run the real risk of lobotomizing your system. After all, what's Windows computer without an intact Registry? An expensive doorstop.

Pick a drive, hide it, log back in, and it's gone. Well, really it's still there, and you can even access it via the Run dialog, but it won't show to any casual passersby. And it's just as easy to un-hide it again as well.

NoDrives Manager is a free Windows application.

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There are all kinds of ways to secure things. Stuff it in the back of a closet. Stick it under a mattress. Bury it in the back yard in a coffee can. These techniques might best be called "security by obscurity". After all, if nobody can find your stuff, then they can't mess with it.

Of course, that doesn't always work. Your kid brother may dig around in your closet. Mom may change the bed. Fido may dig for bones in the back yard. No more secure.

There's another technique that doesn't depend on an item's location to secure it; rather it depends on another sort of trickery. Your house is plainly visible for all to see, yet it's secure because you have a lock on the front door that you have the key to. Your various social media profiles are secure in that they are behind a password. Everybody knows where Twitter is, but without your password, nobody can do anything to your account.

EncryptToClick is a tool that falls into this latter type of security mechanism. It's a quick and easy way to encrypt and password protect files and documents on your system. Just fire it up and choose the file or folder you want to encrypt, supply a password. and your data is safe from prying eyes. This tool uses military grade 256-bit AES encryption, so you know your stuff is secure. And remember—if you forget your password, you're never going to get your data back!

EncryptOnClick is a free download. You can use it on systems running Windows.

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We all know that it's important to guard against the "bad guys" getting onto our systems. Firewall, phishing, Trojan horse—we've heard all the terms related to system security. You know that you should have an anti-virus tool on your system, but for whatever reason, you just haven't gotten around to it. Maybe it seems too complicated, or you've gotten too many false-positives in the past, or maybe it's just too darn expensive. Well, the 800 pound gorilla in the room just got rid of the expense excuse.

The folks in Redmond have released Microsoft Security Essentials, a free application that can help protect your system against viruses, spyware, and other malware. It's easy to install, and they plan to keep it updated so that you'll be ready for the next nasty thing to come at you. It runs quietly in the background, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of your system, ready to jump on the bad guys before they wreak havoc on your machine. They make it all pretty easy to get up and running, with installation instructions and tips on how to scan your system, and even what to do if the tool finds a problem

Microsoft Security Essentials is a Windows application, and it's free for home use. It's compatible with systems running XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

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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.

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You're pretty careful in your computer life. You don't accept cookies that aren't from sites you're visiting. No pop-ups for you. You dump browser history regularly. But you're still leaving traces of everything you do on your system.

Your browser isn't the only thing on your machine that likes to keep track of where you've been and what you've done. Windows itself likes to make a record of things as well—and it doesn't want to let you get rid of this data either. Privacy Mantra can give you a hand with that.

It keeps an eye on all the places on your system that make a record of where you've been, and lets you dump that data. It recognizes potential security compromises and deals with them accordingly. Whether it's web browsers, Microsoft Office applications, or even RegEdit and crash logs, nothing's out-of-bounds for this tool. If you've been there, and your machine's got a record of it, you can probably erase it with Privacy Mantra.

Privacy Mantra is Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 compatible.

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