You suspected it all along, and now it’s official: the “experts” have been forcing us to use passwords the wrong way. Among those practices that actually decrease security: adding weird characters to your text-based password, forcing people to change their password after a certain number of days or logins. The revelation comes from a recent document from NIST. Now there’s only hope that Government websites will start adopting the new guidelines (they’re the worst perpetrators).
In this article, I am repeating much of what I already said in this other article, but with less technical jargon and a few more months available for testing.
Ever got a funny feeling when your password manager popped up offering to save a login that you thought was really, really confidential? Well, you should get it, because this is a sign that the app is able to see everything you’re doing. The developer of this app could get hacked (or the developer of any add-on or extension you’re using, for that matter), and then all your precious logins would be sent to some hacker’s computer without your noticing anything amiss. That is, until you look at your bank account and find that all your life’s savings have been sent to an account in Cayman Islands.
PassLok has had a Chrome app version since 2.0, but now Google has announced that packaged Chrome apps will be discontinued in early 2018. Rather than wait for the blade to fall, we have worked hard to keep the nice features of hosting PassLok though Chrome, and we are adding Firefox in the process. 
Sorry about the title. This post is motivated by Steven’s comments to the “
You’ve seen this advice many times: use a different password for each website you log into, including lowercase, capitals, numbers, and special symbols. Change it often. If you don’t, a hacker that breaks into one of those websites might be able to get into your bank account and your Facebook page, emptying the first of money and filling the second with child porn. But I’d bet you don’t do it because it’s just too hard to come up with a good password for each website, and then remember it. In this post, I’ll be telling you a paper-and-pencil trick derived from one whose author is none other than Turing award winner Manuel Blum, but far less taxing on your brain. 
In Latin, “Tabula Prava” means “crooked table.” This is a play on “Tabula Recta” (straight table), which is a grid full of letters used in a number of classic ciphers, including the 
The “unthinkable” has happened: it is alleged that WhatsApp has a backdoor in its end-to-end encryption, and nobody has actually been getting any security all along. All of this while using the acclaimed “open source” Signal protocol. This article will not break any news, but hopefully will make you think and be safer as a result.
In this article, I go over the meaning of randomness and end up with yet another couple ciphers, based on the Fibonacci series, which become the new champions for paper-and-pencil strength with simplicity.