<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
      type="topic" style="tip"
      id="user-goodpassword">

  <info>
    <link type="guide" xref="user-accounts#passwords"/>
    
    <desc>Use longer, more complicated passwords.</desc>
    <revision pkgversion="3.2" date="2011-09-19" status="candidate"/>
    <credit type="author">
      <name>GNOME Documentation Project</name>
      <email>gnome-doc-list@gnome.org</email>
    </credit>
    <credit type="author">
      <name>Phil Bull</name>
      <email>philbull@gmail.com</email>
    </credit>
    <credit type="author">
      <name>Tiffany Antopolski</name>
      <email>tiffany.antopolski@gmail.com</email>
    </credit>
    
    <include href="legal.xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>
  </info>

<title>Choose a secure password</title>

<note style="important">
 <p>
 Make your passwords easy enough for you to remember, but very difficult for
 others (including computer programs) to guess.  
 </p>
</note>
  <p>Choosing a good password will help to keep your computer safe. If your
 password is easy to guess, someone may figure it out and gain access to your
 personal information.</p>
  <p>People could even use computers to systematically try to guess your
 password, so even one that would be difficult for a human to guess might be
 extremely easy for a computer program to crack. Here are some tips for choosing
 a good password:</p>

<list>
 <item>
  <p>Use a mixture of upper-case and lower-case letters, numbers, symbols and
 spaces in the password.  This makes it more difficult to guess; there are more
 symbols to choose from, so more possible passwords that someone would have to
 check when trying to guess yours.</p>
  <note>
  <p>A good method for choosing a password is to take the first letter of each
 word in a phrase that you can remember.  The phrase could be the name of a
 movie, a book, a song or an album. For example, "Flatland: A Romance of Many
 Dimensions" would become F:ARoMD or faromd or f: aromd.</p>
</note>
 </item>
 <item>
  <p>Make your password as long as possible. The more characters it contains,
 the longer it should take for a person or computer to guess it.</p>
 </item>
 <item>
  <p>Do not use any words that appear in a standard dictionary in any language.
  Password crackers will try these first.   The most common password is
 "password" - people can guess passwords like this very quickly!</p>
  </item>
  <item>
  <p>Do not use any personal information such as a date, license plate number,
 or any family member's name.</p>
  </item>
  <item>
  <p>Do not use any nouns. </p>
 </item>
 <item>
  <p>Choose a password that can be typed quickly, to decrease the chances of
 someone being able to make out what you have typed if they happen to be
 watching you.</p>
 <note style="tip">
  <p>Never write your passwords down anywhere.  They can be easily found!</p>
 </note>
 </item>
 <item>
  <p>Use different passwords for different things.</p>
 </item>

 <item>
  <p>Use different passwords for different accounts.</p>
  <p>If you use the same password for all of your accounts, anyone who guesses
 it will be able to access all of your accounts immediately.</p>
  <p>It can be difficult to remember lots of passwords, however. Though not as
 secure as using a different passwords for everything, it may be easier to use
 the same one for things that don't matter (like websites), and different ones
 for important things (like your online banking account and your email).</p>
 </item>
 
 <item>
  <p>
   Change your passwords regularly.
  </p>
 </item>
</list>

</page>
