This is Steveer Robbins.

Welcome to the Get a Done guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Now that she knows for sure that the NSA is spying on her every move,

my palburn niece has become ever so worried.

She wants her wedding plans to be a surprise for her fiancée Melvin,

and she's afraid that some of the juiciest details,

like the trained giraffe's dance number, will be leaked to the media. In her shoes, I'd worry

more about leaks to the health department, but that's beside the point. She's come to me asking

for help, making her giraffes are us.com account secure. First, I told her to make sure that

she's using a strong password. Tech

Talker did an episode on choosing a strong password earlier this year. There's a link in this

episode's transcript. He recommends using a long sentence with capitalization and punctuation

if your website allows it. Astonishingly, for example, my bank limits passwords to 14 characters

with no special characters,

thus guaranteeing that it can be broke into by a 12-year-old with minimal computer skills.

Bernice likes the password sentence, I love Melvin, but it's weak.

The sentence can be guessed by anyone who knows her, and the NSA knows her really, really well.

Also, the sentence is grammatical,

and a recent paper from Carnegie Mellon and MIT found that using grammatical sentences makes it

much easier for perpetrators to guess a password. And finally, she capitalized and punctuated it

correctly. She capitalized I and Melvin and put an exclamation point at the end.

So that's a problem, too. To make her password more secure, she made it ungrammatical.

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