Afraid that your password is insecure, or hate registering for site after site just to read a few of the articles? Well here are three awesome tools to help you bypass all that annoying stuff.

MD5 Password Generator

This generates a password using a master key, and the domain name. Since your key is the same for every site, it's trivial to be able to retrieve the password for any given domain name. Genius.

I hate passwords. I mean, I don't mind having really important ones be made-up and memorized but what about all those e-commerce and community sites that want me to create accounts? I end up using the same password at all of them and then I feel stupid knowing that one SQL Server exploit or disgruntled admin could cost me my whole identity.

So, this is a little Javascript program that will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the "Site name" field.

Plus an awesome bookmarklet version or three you can just click on and it will pre-fill the password field for you the same every time, and different for each site. Just don't lose the bookmarklet or master key!

Random Password Generator

I actually use this to generate both my username and password for any site where my username isn't going to be displayed anywhere. Otherwise conversations might be a bit awkward. "Hey 7H4aBrlA, what are you up to?"

This tool gives me a secure, random password with any paramaters I want (length, types of characters, etc.). Copy/paste into the requisite fields, and copy/paste into my secure password keeping program, and I'm good to go.

The WinGuides.com Password Generator allows you to create random passwords that are highly secure and extremely difficult to crack or guess due to an optional combination of lower and upper case letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

BugMeNot.com: Bypass Compulsory Web Registrations

This one is really cool. For sites that require you to register just to get in and read some articles, this site lets people share registrations so you don't need to register - just log in with the community password.

BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).

They also have a bookmarklet version, Firefox and IE extentions.

Tranglos Keynote

Tranglos Keynote is a good way to store your passwords. There are programs dedicated to this, but I prefer a good ole outliner that saves encrypted files because it lets me store more information about the site, like the entire registration email, alternate ID's, etc.

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