Srcasm

I have some pretty awesome news to share with all of you, my faithful readers.  As of now, I’m working for Passpack, the secure, online, password manager that I’ve been talking about for almost two years!  This is starting out as part-time community/product/technology evangelism and educator for both Passpack and online identity protection.  No one wants to wind up like Sarah Palin and her Yahoo account, right?  That’s what I’m going to do — I’m going to to help you to protect yourself (and your digital self) both online and off — and we’ll do it in style.

To start off, I’ll be helping Passpack and their awesome team ramp up their blog and education strategies.  We’ll try to teach people how to choose stronger passwords, better security answers (for password resets) and safeguard all of their important data.  We’ll try to help answer any questions you might have about how Passpack (or any other password manager) works and educate you on the ways that people get comprimised online.  Once we get some of those things in order, we’ll move on to helping to spread the Passpack, secure messaging and shared host-proof hosting love around the world.

Now, I have one simple request from you.  Let me know how I can help you.  Whether it’s with Passpack or online security, I want to lend a helping hand.  If you’re not sure on something that I’ve talked about, let me know.  If you have an idea of how to make Passpack or online identity protection better, I want to hear it.  Not so hard, right?  Go ahead and ask away and remember, as my 3rd grade teacher always told me, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Passpack rolled out with a great new feature…  Now everyone with a Twitter (or FriendFeed) account can log right into Passpack in under 25 seconds!  (Check out the nifty 24 second screen cast.)  How awesome is that?  Today seems like a great day to start securing your online accounts with stronger, longer and better passwords with Passpack’s help.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a huge fan of technology.  I love to be on the cutting edge, get into the latest betas and also find useful tools to help your everyday life.  Passpack is one of many tools that I use every day of my life.  I keep information like my bank accounts, usernames and passwords and ever birthday gift ideas for the fiancee in there.  I know that it’s safe (because of host-proof hosting) and it’s easy to use because they are continuously rolling out new features to help everyone store their information securely online.

To show you how easy it is to use a service like Passpack, I created a quick 30 second screencast of logging in/creating a new account using the one of many login methods that Passpack has implemented.  Google is by far my favorite (until Twitter-login is rolled out).  This means that you don’t even need a separate username and password to create your Passpack account.  If that isn’t simple, I don’t know what is.

Check it out and let me know what you think.  The good, the bad and the ugly are all acceptable responses.

I recently sat in a meeting to discuss our company’s laptop security practices. Now, we aren’t a publicly traded company but we should be protecting out data to the best of our abilities without impacting the user too much. There we many topics discussed in this meeting — everything from encryption of the HDs to using encrypted thumb drives to CMOS passwords/HD passwords via the CMOS. It was a fun time and explaining why certain processes would be helpful and others wouldn’t was quite a challenge.

I think we finally came to the realization that encrypting all of our hard drives was not going to be a viable option. The major issue we face is we have too many older laptops that do not offer hardware encryption on the drives. Software encryption is an option but in my experience it’s a slow and painful process that usually requires some work on the user’s end to make it function properly. (more…)