If you want a fun and visual way to check your passwords, take a look at the passwordmeter webpage. It contains a password checker which shows you the strength of your password and breaks it down into many factors, showing their relative weight in the equation and how well you do in each.

It adds points for character count, number count, symbol count and so on, and deducts for things like letters only passwords, consecutive numbers, sequential letters and so on.

It’s actually quite a useful tool if you have a password and want to modify it a bit. You can add a number instead of a letter, replace a consecutive letter with a symbol and so on.

I knew it existed, but I was only faced with it truly when I started writing my blog. There is a kind of spam that I think is a bit annoying, but acceptable. These are the people who own a company or web service, and go around on people’s blogs, writing quasi-useful comments with their link inside.

First of all, it is not really good netiquette to include your link in forums, or comments. It may also get filtered if a blog has a very aggressive spam filtering system. Second of all, you can enter your website in the form, and if someone likes your comment, they can click on your name and whoosh, they’re at the site. The goal would be to write an interesting enough comment.

However, I am prepared to accept “spam” like this, that is at leas half relevant. I wrote a post on managing your tasks with Remember the Milk a while ago, and recently approved the following comment:

“The logo is cute - no doubt
I was using the service untill I realized I needed something more. Now I’m with Wrike.com [http://www.wrike.com/]. It’s a very cool project management service.”

I can’t say 100% that this is spam, but I’m pretty sure, since Wrike is a pay for application. It’s also not exactly a substitute for Remember the Milk, but, it is similar. I also like the fact that the commenter actually read some of the post. I really-really dislike spam, but comments like this are acceptable, since they show you alternatives.

If you have a service you want to promote it’s fine posting a comment in every blog I think, but at least make the effort to contribute to the subject at hand. If you do, I think you should be ok, even if you put in your link, I mean I understand that services need traffic. If y”our product is really bad, no amount of traffic will save you anyway.

A type of troublesome email I’ve seen recently is fake Hallmark e-card emails. If you get one, be sure to hover over the link to the card itself. In the email I received, the link points to “http://62.183.68.110/card.exe”, hardly a legit Hallmark card.

If you get anything that isn’t directly from someone you know, or doesn’t contain any very specific info about the sender, always take care with clicking links. Even if you do click this Hallmark one, you still have to choose to save or run it, if you accidentally run into this, just cancel and you should be ok.

I wanted to contact Hallmark about this, but in the process it became clear that they know about the problem, so in the end I didn’t submit my email. Good job Hallmark for noticing and doing something, I hope they manage to accomplish something.