Clever s*ds - help required please!!

[dramaticat]

Well, you sign up for an ebay account, take a photo of the thing you're selling, decide how much you want for it, use the ebay forms to set up your 'advert', press 'go' (or whatever the button is) and keep your fingers crossed someone places a bid Oh, and I think you need a Paypal account these days as it's obligatory to offer that as a form of payment (I haven't sold anything for about a year, so I may be a bit out of date).

Seriously, it's not hard. If you want to PM me with any questions, please do. Or go on to ebay and look through the 'how to sell' instructions - I'm sure you don't need to sign up to read about how it all works.

I've not sold anything through Amazon, but I'm sure it's a very similar process.

[giraffe]

Oh dear! I hate paypal. I can never get it to work. It's almost as bad as the verified by visa thing which asks you 403 stupid questions and then tells you it's experiencing problems and to try again later.

[dramaticat]

Ah yes, the Visa thing. It's all very well when you set it up, but not so good a few weeks later when you've forgotten the password!

And there are so many passwords to remember that require different numbers of letters etc, that I find I have to write down the ones I don't use very often

[Scurra]

I have a trick with passwords, which is that I have a "standard" one (that is a mix of letters and numbers as they all should be) and then add just three or four characters to the end that relates to the site. Then I only have to remember one actual password, which is a lot easier! It also makes it easier to change the password regularly (which is a good plan) and if you find a site where you haven't changed the password it's a lot easier to figure out what it should be.

(Yes, this is technically insecure. It's nothing like as insecure as writing your passwords down though. )

[dramaticat]

Don't ask me to change them, please! Actually, I've just thought of an easy way you could, as long as just changing a couple of characters is enough to make it worthwhile.

I do have completely different passwords for each of the financial institutions I use on line, plus a couple of 'general' ones I use for sites not involving money. I can just about remember those! The passwords themselves are not particularly 'strong' though.

But because you have to remember them easily, passwords are by nature going to be insecure - unless your brain is a computer

[MBH]

I have a trick with passwords,

I've just described a very similar trick to the people on my computer bus. Should I admit that to people who have access to admistration permissions??? [Just as well I trust you]

[Bunnylump]

At work, I have to change my password every two weeks!! It drives me mental. We are also not allowed to use the any of our previous 3 passwords again. I've asked the IT men why I have to do this so often, and they said they system " randomly" picks people and asks them to change password. All I can say is it's not very random. I've been doing this for the past 11 years!!! Some of my colleagues NEVER have to change theirs!! Maybe I just look shifty...

[Scurra]

You'll be glad to know that all the passwords on this system are encrypted, so even if I wanted to take a look it wouldn't do me any good at all! And whilst it is also true that you can "reverse engineer" passwords from an encrypted list (by encoding lots of common words and seeing if any of them are on the encrypted list), even adding a single digit or letter to a common word - especially in the middle somewhere - is often sufficient to defeat that.

However, I will admit that the passwords used to access puzzles on here are not encrypted at all. Then again, they are "one-shot" passwords that are tied to particular users so if someone did steal all of them they wouldn't be able to do much with them. Well, apart from look at the puzzles, I suppose

[Bunnylump]

I seriously hope you're not sufficiently sad to want to do that though...I haven't RECENTLY tried selling drugs, giving away classified secrets or posting naked photos on this site...

[giraffe]

I usually find when I can't remember the password to something (and I have several that I do variations on for different sites) I go through the change password procedure enter what I want as my new password and then it comes up with a message that tells me it won't let me change it to what it was originally So then at least I know what the password is and go back 43 pages to the one that asked for the password!

My DVP password I entered a word backwards, and you had to enter it twice. I then found when I tried to log in that I can't spell backwards, and had entered it with the same spelling mistake both times. So it was a word backwards, except for the last two letters which were in the right order!

I have recently had to start writing them all down. I don't do online banking, so most of them aren't that sensitive.

[Bunnylump]

I actually once made the mistake of using Bunnylump as my password at work. The problem was that I forgot my password so had to get the IT men to look it up. They have NEVER let me forget it!!

[dramaticat]

That's why they get you to change it so often, then - in the hope you'll give them another good laugh

Actually, back in the day when I worked for other people, it wasn't the computer passwords we had to change every month, it was the bloody voicemail message box one - and I never used voicemail! And of course, on the rare occasion that someone left me a message and I had to retrieve it, I had to think up some new password first - which I then promptly forgot ...

[gill216]

I have a pretty good system for passwords that need changed monthly. I pick a 6 letter word at the start of the year and add 01 02 etc depending on what month it is. That way the word only needs changed annually and I know what the figures are because its the month

[eirian]

I use a similar technique, Gill, but just keep counting up. They change passwords every 6 weeks here, so just having the month letter got too confusing as it wasn't always that month. So I just started at 1 and went up.

I must admit that all my forum passwords are the same. I use different ones for ones I need to be secure though. Although it's usually a particular word for the type of website (eg, one for games, one for financial) and then different numbers for each usage of that word.

[Bunnylump]

That's why they get you to change it so often, then - in the hope you'll give them another good laugh

I think you could have a point there...

[LAT]

I have so many different passwords at work. And they all have different criteria so while for some I can use a basic word/number combination there are others that require only 4 digits. Some need changing every couple of months, some don't. Some you can switch between a couple of options and some you can never use the same again. So I also trawl up through the numbers. I'm on 11 for one of them at the moment.
And then I got a new e-mail installed when I wasn't in and my colleague misread what I'd asked to be set up as my password so I have yet another variation on my regular one. aaaaaaaaaagh.

[clvrlad]

well ive got a few basic ones i cycle through or leave fixed depending on where and when im likely to use them and what they are guarding

from a 16 character letter and numbers (gibberish)one
to simple shifting the user name
ie
username=clvrlad
password=/=lvrladc

mind i could just type a few words with my spelling its pretty hard to get it

[Bunnylump]

That's true. And if someone did get into your documents they wouldn't be able to decipher them anyway...

[MBH]

Grrrrrrrrr - I'm sure this has happened to me before, and may have been fixed from this thread (or PM) but I can't find it.

Downloaded the 2011 version of AVG virus checker (as prompted), and when I restarted the machine it updated Firefox.... or maybe it was the other way round - Firefox updated when I switched on to download AVG

Anyway - I did not get to RUN the AVG installation as I needed to go out. When I returned 30mins later. NO INTERNET! I'm thinking one of the downloads has set a switch on my internet options, but since I don't know what they should look like I can't do a "spot the difference".

My broadband line is plugged driect into my wireless router (Netgear) which is plugged directly into my PC. I'm typing this on the other computer which is the wireless link to the router - so I know the broadband is getting INTO the house.

Any ideas? [People keep telling me I'm a "computer expert" and look puzzled when I ask what they mean. I can do magic with a working computer, but there are large gaps I know s*d all about and I'm too lazy to learn]

YES - I've restarted the PC and powered down the router

No hurry - I'm at the bar tonight so it will be tomorrow before I can experiment.

[katsmom]

No hurry - I'm at the bar tonight so it will be tomorrow before I can experiment.

Taken out of context that is pretty funny! Mind, if it were me, after a night of being in the bar-that would be the perfect time to try and work out my computer problems!