A common side effect of the increasing importance of the cloud is that the typical user has more and more passwords as software turns into a service that the user subscribes to. This trend is bound to continue as more and more services are available publicly.

I have found myself remarking that I have a lot of passwords to keep track of. There are multiple email accounts, social networking accounts, forums subscriptions, software subscriptions, so on and so forth. The proliferation of which usually causes people to do silly things such as write their passwords down to keep track of them, or using the same password for everything (I’ve done this before as others have).

As you might expect, there’s software on the web that lets you keep track of, manage, and protect your passwords. I’ve decided to provide an overview on one such program, free ware called Password Safe that you can obtain at the following address.

After installation, launching Password Safe for the first time requires the creation of a new password database. At this point you must create a master password for use with the database. You have to enter a long, well encrypted password with uppercase and lowercase letters, a mix of alphanumeric characters. The system actually warns you if you select a master password that is easily decrypted.

Select a New Database to get started.

You're going to have to enter a very well constructed Combination for Password Safe to approve it.

You can drag your password into a field without typing anything.

Password Safe’s philosophy seems to be overcautious, and I suppose it should be considering the sensitive nature of what it is guarding. If you let this program go idle for five minutes and come back, it will require you re-enter the master password. I would suggest writing this password down on a piece of paper and filing it away, hopefully after constant re-use you’ll memorize it. Thankfully it’s the only password you’ll ever need to remember as the program is going to store the rest for you...with a secure encryption of course.

Password Safe will generate a password for you with a random generator. In order to enter the password you can just click and drag from the window to the field where the password needs to be placed. This is especially convenient when wanting to avoid key-logger issues.

With the assistance of Password Safe you can systematically rework all your passwords and significantly enhance your security with web applications, a comforting thought when you perform online banking or other such sensitive material.

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