In conjunction with the freeware title called sharedSecrets that we introduced yesterday, another problem in joining multiple websites is to generate random passwords. A few weeks ago, an advertising network company we are affiliated with started delivering porn ads to our system. They’ve eventually screwed up our account. So we’ve been looking for new ones these days. Some of them are too slow in responding. Some of them cannot be trusted. So we’ve ended up creating close to a dozen accounts. If you do it 10 to 12 times, it’s not fun manually generating random usernames and passwords, you know?

So we need help in generating random usernames and passwords as much as we need to comprehensively manage them. A couple of days ago, we ran into a freeware title called Password Builder. It looks nice. It even supports Greek characters to generate strong passwords. But… It will run only under Leopard. Hmm… So what are other choices do OS X 10.4 users have?

And we found another Mac freeware title called RPG (Random Password Generator) by David Kreindler. That’s what this software review is all about. So let’s see how RPG works. 

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At a glance, there is nothing special about RPG. The first entry lets you decide how many characters you want in your password. (See Screenshot 01.) Uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, special characters… You need to decide to what to include by checking boxes. Then there are 2 text boxes. The top one lets you add to your password generation scheme other characters besides uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. And the bottom text box lets you exclude characters from your password generating scheme. So let me add $ and & to my exclude list. (See Screenshot 04.)

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There’s another check box at the bottom. It says Show Password. If checked, a password being generated will be displayed at the text strip right above. So let me click on the New Password button to generate one. (See Screenshot 05.) If not checked, then characters will be visually converted into password bullets. (See Screenshot 06.)

Whether or not you want to display your password, you need to click on the Copy button to the right to actually copy it to the clipboard. Now that my actual password cannot be viewed, so let me copy it. And I’m going to press Command plus P on a document file. (See Screenshot 07.)

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Okay. There’s one more entry at the very bottom of the window. (See Screenshot 08.) It says Number. What does it do? This entry determines how many sets of passwords you want to generate. So let me change the number of password sets to 4 and click on New Passwords. After copying them to the clipboard, I pasted them on the document file above. (See Screenshot 09.)

Oh, by the way, there’s another clickable button at the top right. (See Screenshot 10.) Let’s see what it does. A drawer will open to the right. So we can perhaps store the passwords that have been generated? Let’s click on the Add button at the bottom and enter ‘4 passwords.’ Now, something has been registered. (See Screenshot 11.) But wait… How could I retrieve those passwords? Well, this function is not designed to store passwords. Rather, it’s used to store password generating schemes. We’ll get to that in a minute.

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By the way, I looked forward to using Password Builder, which I mentioned at the beginning, because it supports Greek letters. But RPG doesn’t look like it supports them, does it? Not that fast… All you have to do is add them to the include text box, right? Actually, it even supports Asian languages including Japanese (Hiragana + Katakana + Kanji Yay!). (See Screenshot 12.)

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All right. So let me add some Greek characters to the include list. (See Screenshot 13.) Now, let me open the drawer and click on the Add button. And I’m going to name this scheme Greek. (See Screenshot 14.) Then let me randomize a password generating scheme by changing the length and removing include & exclude characters. (See Screenshot 15.) And if I click on the saved scheme in the drawer once… Ahh… My password generating scheme is back with Greek characters. (See Screenshot 16.)

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Okay. But what if I quit the application? Will I get my password generating scheme back after relaunching it? Let’s see what happens. So I’m going to quit RPG. (See Screenshot 17.) If I relaunch it… Again, my scheme is back with Greek letters. (See Screenshot 18.)

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And my last 2 questions to RPG are what are the maximal length of passwords and maximal number of password sets? Let me increase the length to 500. And that’s no problem for RPG. (See Screenshot 19.) Okay. How about 500 x 500? That means, can RPG generate 500 sets of passwords consisting of 500 characters? Let’s see. I won’t blame it on RPG, but it looks like it’s going take RPG a while to do such a big job. (See Screenshot 20.) Eventually, it took RPG about 5 minutes to generate 500 sets of passwords with 500 characters. (See Screenshot 21.) You can increase the length up to 999. Actually, it let me create a password consisting of 27672 (27673 minus 1) after manually entering 100000 to the length box. (See Screenshot 22.)

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By the way, why do I want to add Greek and Japanese characters to make passwords? That’s because I want to increase the number of possible combinations. Here is a pop quiz. how many combinations does a 15-character-strongpassword with the following scheme?

The answer is… 19,831,742,626,597,600,000,000,000,000 combinations, right?

And why do I want to make passwords so strong? That’s because cyber idiots steal e-mail accounts, profile accounts and website accounts by guessing usernames and passwords. A common mistake that webmasters make is that they leave their administrative usernames identifiable. Bad administrative usernames are admin, administrator, mike35… (A name indicated below each article title as in Screenshot 23 is a decoy so that cyber predators can waste their time.) It will be worse if they leave those usenames viewable here and there at the website. As a result, they get their websites confiscated for phishing and scam purposes.

For more information on how to protect yourself from cyber predators, you may want to see references at the bottom. And click here to a list of Greek characters that you may want to add to your include list.

In conclusion, this freeware title is great. We like it a lot. It’s so easy to use. And you can even include Greek and Asian characters in passwords. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact identity of the software developer. So we cannot give even 1 star. We won’t recommend anyone to use it. If it looks good, you may want to use it at your own risks.

MacHouse recommendation: It’s a very useful Mac freeware title. We would give 5 stars if the software developer listed their office location at their website. Because it’s not listed, there is no recommendation of any kind from us. If if you think it’ll be useful, you may want to use it at your own risks.






RPG is a product of David Kreindler.






References:

Website Security: Protecting Your Website
Website security for webmasters
Internet security for terminal users
Free web hosts to avoid

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