To keep your passwords unknown—and unknowable—follow these pointers:

Do combine parts of two unusual unrelated words, such as gastrocumulus or cytoplasticity. The longer and stranger the better.

Do mix capital and lowercase characters, as well as symbols and numbers, in the middle of the password: f2reeDoMeYe#wTness, not freedomeyewitness.

Do use words from a foreign language in combo with an English word. Many hackers try to crack passwords with common words, or with those pooled from the dictionary database of a single language.

Don’t use anything that can be easily guessed by neighbors, co-workers or strangers who get their hands on your wallet—a nickname, child’s name, pet’s name, or your favorite sports team or hobby.

Don’t use slightly different versions of the same password on different websites, such as ABCebay, ABCmortgage or and ABCvisa.

Don’t pair a common word or your name with a different character at the beginning or end, such as $user or johnsmith7.

Don’t use the same password from one application to another. “It’s fine to have a simple, short password on a news website,” says Dr. Tygar. “But use a different, longer, more complicated password on a site with sensitive information.”

skeeboo.com is a new anonymous proxy web surfing tool that will make you anonymous to the web sites you visit through it. Why would you need to anonymize yourself? Sometimes you don’t want a site to get your IP address. More commonly, you’re somewhere like work or school, or China and your internet access is restricted due to filters. Proxies, in theory, help you bypass these filters.

Proxies have been around for years on the web, however they’re usually very slow or are littered with popup ads. New generations of proxies like skeeboo cut the annoying popups and stick with intrusive free advertising, such as Google AdSense. Worth a try.

Business Week Online has an article entitled You Are What You Post, about the backlash of people being so open online. Many employers do web searches on people they hire now and are finding web sites, blogs, MySpace accounts and so forth.

Schools are warning parents about Google’s danger to the MySpace generation, for whom the Internet functions as a virtual diary-meets-barstool confessional. Adolescents try on identities and new behaviors like sweaters. Only now they are trying them on in front of the world. A Pew Research survey found that more than half of all online teenagers are ripping, mixing, and burning their own content, usually placing their creations right alongside their names and photos. The teenagers on the “companies and co-workers” section of MySpace who are talking smack about employers like Blockbuster (BBI), Target (TGT), and Gap (GPS) are clearly unaware of the implications. “People need to realize that this is like putting stuff up on the 6 o’clock news,” says employment lawyer Garry G. Mathiason, a partner at San Francisco’s Littler Mendelson. “Once you’ve opened the drapes, people can see everything. They can see your past life.”

That’s why Dave Fonseca, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, pulled his Facebook profile down in December. “Employers are looking at these things,” he says. (It’s easy for people to get passwords and noodle around on the site.) Fonseca even knows the verb for people who get fired for what they put on their Web sites: “dooced.” The name comes from Dooce.com, the blog of Heather B. Armstrong, who got canned after writing about her job on her blog.

Wireless home networks can be dangerous. If not setup properly, you are exposing the files on your computers to any hackers and potentially setting yourself to be accused of criminal activity. You see, if people are going to do illegal things online, they’d rather use a connection that does not belong to them. It offers them an extra layer of protection against getting busted. However, it’s your IP address that gets recorded with such activity, and ultimately your door the police will be knocking on.

Now if you have an unsecured open connection, people will connect to it, either on purpose or by accident, and surf the web on your dime doing who knows what. This could lead to slow speeds on your broadband connection for you if too many people are on it. That is once side of it. The other side is the hackers that will try to get access to your router administration panel and from there try to gain access to your private files on your PC, or install keyboard loggers that record everything you type, just to name a few.Here are a few layers of protection that will ensure this does not happen to you.

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You have a laptop with wireless internet access. You noticed that there are many free public wireless hotspots you can connect to and browse the web on. Many businesses, such as hotels and restaurants offer it as an extra service to entice you to patron their establishment.

However, with such open access comes serious security issues. Here are a few tips to protect yourself when using public Wi-Fi connections.

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On MySpace.com, teenagers can find kindred spirits who share their love of sports, their passion for photography or their crush on a Hollywood star. They can also find out where their online friends live, where they attend school, even what they look like.

And so can adults.

Parents, school administrators and police are increasingly worried that teens are finding trouble online at sites like MySpace, the leader of the social-networking sites that encourage users to build larger and larger circles of friends.

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Choosing a good password is as simple as not choosing a word that might appear in a dictionary. Hackers have lists of dictionary terms and can literally run a program for days, even weeks that will try each and every one until it gains access. Another good tip is to choose something with at least 8 characters. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack; especially if it’s a good combination of letters and numbers.

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