Peter Grandstaff

Web Marketing for Your Small Business

Google Wave Coverage – May 2009 eNewsletter

May sure has flown by.  I hope your month has been profitable.  Have you gotten Google Analytics set up on your site yet?  If you need some help, hit that reply button and let me know!  One of my clients is so excited by his Analytics data that he checks it first thing every morning.  It’s always a pleasure to see someone take the ball and run with it.  This month…

Newsletter Contents

  • And now for something completely different…

Google I/O 2009 Keynote

This month I resolved to exclude Google from the newsletter.  I was going to talk about customer retention strategies.  It’s all the rage these days, what with the economy and all.

Then I watched a video on YouTube. This video blew my mind. It was the first announcement of a new Google product that will change the world, and how we communicate. So, I’ve decided to depart from my usual format and tell you about what I saw.
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Password Safety & Security Made Easy

How secure is your privacy?

These days we all end up with tons of passwords.  We rely on these passwords to keep sensitive information safe, but the truth is that information is only as safe as its password is secure.  In my experience people tend to use simple, insecure passwords because they have a hard time remembering long strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation.   Well it can be a lot easier than you might think.  I found this video put together by AARP and Google that gives a good introduction:

I’ve been a fan of using initial letters from a phrase to form a password since college.  That’s the method the Network Systems Administrator there taught me.  What the video above doesn’t talk about though is complexity.  Watch the longer video below for more on that.

A password made out of six lowercase letters is never going to be a strong and secure password, even if they are random.  The best passwords are at least 10 characters long and include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation.  Okay, it’s about time for an example…

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