Reading about the recent security breaches at Sony, Lockheed and HBGary/Bank of America, etc., as well as the apparent over-reaction by the Pentagon has got me thinking about my own day-to-day security practices. It was incredible how often those breaches could have been mitigated or prevented altogether by exceedingly basic security practices. I'm obviously not expecting to raise the ire of Anonymous any time soon, but I value privacy, and there are some real concerns.
The main one is that various state entities have made it clear they would like unimpeded access to everyone's data. Less than a year ago a US Wikileaks volunteer was flying back into the country when his encoded laptop was seized and authorities demanded he decode for them to read. He refused.
In Canada, the Harper regime is preparing to force all internet providers to develop means to let the police spy on all our online activities without needing a warrant, under a so-called "Lawful Access" provision.
To drive the point home further, one of the websites I host for a community group was compromised last year, luckily only by a spammer, who had invisibly injected Viagra ads into the site's source code.
After taking all this in, and reading an interesting but pretty heady Wikipedia page on password strategies, I remembered uneasily that all my email accounts, all my web forum logins, all my bank info for that matter, basically used variations on one of three passwords I had memorized, none of which was exceptionally strong. If someone gets ahold of a web forum password you use, which are often poorly protected, and it's the same one used for banking, that could be a bad thing. With Lawful Access (mentioned above), it's going to be dead simple for the Canadian government to gather any passwords transmitted as cleartext, as many are. For me to reliably remember more than about three passwords, I'd have to write them down, which leads to other problems.
I've now switched over to a piece of free password management software called KeePass (or rather KeePassX, which also runs on Ubuntu), and I only have to remember one password, the one to decode the KeePass database I created. That database stores all of the passwords to my other sites. Better still, it generates passwords automatically for you. Unique, 30 character passwords that use mixed case, numbers, and random punctuation (where allowed) have me feeling much better. Best of all it's fairly straightforward to install and use, and following some simple steps you can use it with a free Dropbox account, as described here, to have access to your passwords on any computer.
As is always the case with security, there is a tradeoff between advantages and drawbacks, so read the documentation before installing. The big drawback is that if you forget the password to your KeePass database, or lose the database, all of your passwords are gone forever.
I may at some point go further still and, like the Wikileaks guy, encode my entire laptop... if I ever own one.
Update 1:43PM: And just hours after posting this, the Dominion published an article titled How community organizers are working together for more secure online communications.
Someone recently asked me what RSS feeds I'm following in my newsreader. Here's what they are right now.
Have you ever spent half an hour composing a brilliant comment (or any other web form content), only to hit the wrong button and lose it entirely? It's even worse when it's the browser's fault. Even if this hasn't happened to you (and I find that hard to believe), there's no reason for you to not install this 
A dialog will pop up to add the keyword. You'll notice it's stored as a bookmark. The name you give it doesn't matter so much. I store all my keywords in a separate subfolder, but that doesn't matter much either. Make sure to put something in the "keyword" box, though. I use wp for Wikipedia. Then you can do quick Wikipedia searches by going to your browser's location bar (that's the one with the URL, get there quickly by hitting Ctrl+L) and type, for example, "wp molasses flood" to learn about the Boston molasses disaster of 1919.
Justin Podur was 
