In the last 2 weeks 5 of my friends have had one of their accounts hacked and all sorts of stuff have happened, the latest was today. So let me offer some Geek Wisdom in the form of a couple of very easy things that you can do to protect yourself online.

1- Do not use the same password on every site on the web, face it if you do, 1 hacker figures out just a little simple information about you, asks to reset your password and suddenly you’re compromised. Use a different password everywhere!

2- Use STRONG passwords; want to use a strong password and a different one on each site? A password that you can actually remember? Do this: Take a name that you will remember, substitute symbols for letters like @ for A and $ for S, next add a phone number like your first phone number you ever had, then add a DASH and the 1st three letters of that site something like M@ry8005551212-Fac each site is semi-unique. It’s strong but if someone figures out your pattern you’re done.

3- Get a password generator, my old fav was KeyPass, it sits on your machine and creates some strong passwords then locks them away into a database, it’s based on the principal of a Secret Master Key that you know but the issue is that if you damage the database you’re cooked!

4- My new Fav is Super Gen Pass at http://supergenpass.com/ this is not a database, it’s a simple script that you download to your Bookmarks then when you go to a site that needs a password it creates a special password just for that site based on the site name and your master key, encrypts it and makes it very strong!

To use all you do is enter your secret master key which can be something that only you know and can easily remember, click on the link you saved for SuperGenPass in your bookmarks and it automatically populates the password on the site with a super strong password.

Finally don’t use PUBLIC COMPUTERS for email or personal business and be aware of the guy at Starbucks that’s sitting on his computer next to you while you use the public WiFi, he’s likely stealing your packets, if you can sit next to him so you can see HIS screen, if they get uncomfortable, they’re probably stealing your information.

In my continued quest to re-purpose and save the few $$$’s that I have, I took out an old PC that was collecting dust and by today’s standards is pretty much useless and setup a Boxee Box (www.boxee.tv).

In all took about 30 minutes to setup, which included the reformatting of the hard drive to a Linux system, pointed it to my share drive and it found all my movies, then went out and found the IMDB data for each movie and added box cover artwork!

Such a cool piece of software, very streamlined in it’s Ubuntu environment and best of all, FEEDS!!! All my favorite feeds from Netflix to Revision 3 are all available.

Technology ROCKS!