How do you create a strong password for your Facebook account?

DRAFT

How do you create a strong password for your Facebook account?

As you can see on this link, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/apple-google-pressed-for-answers-at-privacy-hearing/2011/05/10/AFdUAmiG_blog.html, Facebook has no intention to change its ways.  Their MO is that they will provide tools for people to protect themselves but they are not necessarily going to keep the bad guys away from you.  Any pedophile can get on Facebook by simply providing a fake name.  Any wannabe hacker can create as many fake accounts he or she wants on Facebook with impunity.  Children less than thirteen years old can go to the library and open a Facebook account by just lying about their age behind their parents' back.  People can harass you, post lies about you, and attack your reputation, while having little to worry about because they use fake accounts in the first place.

When you block people who use fake accounts, they can come back the next day via a different fake account or simply by changing their name.  If Facebook gave a damn about users' interests, they would have made sure a long time ago that users can place blocks on others based on a party's Facebook id, and not just based on a person's name or email accounts since a user can change these items pretty much at will.

On Facebook, your worst enemy can open an account under the name of someone that you know and care about in order to get onto your friend list even though you really don’t want to have anything to do with that specific person. When that person gets on your friend's list, that person can set you up with an innocuous link where your password can be captured.  When your enemy captures your password, your enemy can easily set you up.  Does that sound like the wild west to you?  It sure sounds like it to me.  That’s why I insist that Facebook must do more to keep children under thirteen away from its site, and that’s why I advocate that Facebook must do a lot more to keep the bad guys away.  Facebook has a moral duty to do so.  And having a team of one hundred people to oversee the behavior of 600 million people is simply ludicrous.

As much as I would like to help as many people as I can, alone I cannot stop fraud and money scams on Facebook.  But I can tell you what measures you can take to protect yourself.  I have discussed most of these measures in the following note collection:  https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=185824474780691.  Today, I want to concentrate on how to create such a strong password to your Facebook account that even the best hackers in the world would have a hard time hacking it.  How do you create a password of 37-alphanumeric-character long like mine that includes ASCII codes as well?

Any version of Windows comes with the program, “charmap.exe.”  You can search for it and then run it.  You can use almost any combination of special characters from the map in order to create your password.  You can use the key sequence Ctrl+a to highlight the string that you choose for your password, paste it on your screen momentarily, print it on a piece of paper until you learn it by heart, and then use the string as your password.  You can make your password so complex that no hacker can actually decode the sequence.  The longer the string is, the more difficult it would be for a hacker to hack your password.  Of course, it’s tough to memorize a 37-character string like mine is.  What I suggest is that you start with maybe a password of nine alphanumerical characters and ASCII codes.  Memorize that string.  Then change your password by adding one or two special characters at a time.  Continue on with that process until you memorize a very long string of symbols, characters, ASCII codes, etc.  I promise you that if you do that, hackers won’t even bother to try to decipher your password.  It will simply be almost impossible for them to decipher it in a lifetime.

For other ideas about how to protect yourself on Facebook, make sure that you subscribe to my notes.  You can do so by simply clicking on one of the note links in this article, and click on subscribe at the top of the screen where the content of the note is displayed.

I think that the best RSS Feed Reader by far is the Google Reader.  That’s why I recommend that you download it if you don’t have it on your computer.  You can use it to subscribe to your own notes as well as anyone else’s notes on Facebook.  Yes, you can even subscribe to people’s notes that are not on your friend list.  You might have to use Google or an intermediate friend to obtain a copy of a note of theirs that has a privacy setting of everyone, but as long as you have access to one of their notes with a privacy setting of everyone, you can subscribe to their notes.  You will only be able to view notes with a privacy setting of everyone though if you are not on their friend list.

Because of the above fact, it is extremely important to be careful about notes you set with a privacy setting of everyone.  Anyone on the Internet can read such a note.  Anyone on Facebook can mark them as abusive even if they are not.  One person who was conducting a scam on Facebook did exactly that to me.  She marked every single one of my notes with a privacy setting of everyone as abusive so that people couldn’t access them.  It was her way of telling me that if you report my scam, I can make life very difficult for you.  Thank God it only took Facebook just two days to remove the blocks they placed on my links as a result of this person’s doing.  Had it not been for my broad knowledge of Facebook, I would have been pulling my hair off as a result of this person’s nastiness.

When someone puts a block on you, I recommend that you immediately place a block on that person as well even though you do not intend to interact with that person anymore.  The reason for this is if you don’t have a block on that person, he or she can remove the block on you at any time and keep on harassing you at will.  But if you have a block on them as well, that makes it harder for the person to continue to harass you.  If you have a block on the person, the person cannot take revenge on you by simply marking all of your notes with a privacy setting of everyone on them as abusive as what happened to me above.  Many Facebook users with that kind of mentality can easily bypass your block by simply changing the name on their account.  Since the old name is no longer associated with their account, your block on them under their old name will be totally ineffective.  That’s why I strongly suggest that you keep a separate list of the people you have blocked and include their Facebook ID on that list as well so that you can track these people’s name changes.  I am trying to convince Facebook to add another box to the block list so that people can block a person by his or her user ID instead of just their name or email address.  The reason for this is even if the person changes the email address associated with the account or the name, the block will remain effective under that account if there was a box where one could enter the Fbk user id instead of just their name and email address(es).  This would make it more difficult for a person to use that kind of deception to continue to harass others.

Even if you associate a strong password with your Facebook account, hackers can still get a hold of it if you navigate to an unsecured site designed to capture your password.  That's why you must be careful about navigating to links that are outside of Facebook.  You must always double check the domain name to make sure it's a reputable one.  In addition, you must add a plug-in to your browser that will automatically check a link to make sure that the link is not one that's known to be used for phishing purposes.  Change your password on a regular basis to make it tougher for hackers to get hold of it.  Run the Ghost image of your drive on a regular basis to make sure that any bot lurking around on your system to capture your password is automatically removed from your system.  By running your ghosted image on a regular basis, your system will run faster and if someone captured your password without you being aware of it, you will stop them right in their track.

As I write this, Facebook has not added the necessary box under the Block List feature.  How hard can it be to just add a field to their database?  I urge all of my friends to navigate here, https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=ui_privacy, and then copy the following text in the suggestion box:

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Facebook must add a box under the Block List Feature where people can enter a user's Fbk id when they want to block a person.  This will make it harder for people who use fake names and fake accounts to harass others.  Many users use fake accounts to send harassing messages to others and then immediately place a block on the victim so that the latter cannot respond or even navigate to the attacker's site to report them.  By the time the victim finally gets around to report the harassment and places a block on the person, the attacker simply changes his or her name to avoid the block.  This is absolutely ludicrous.  The attacker should not be allowed to bypass a block that easily.  By adding a box that allows people to place a block based on someone's Fbk id, this would make it much more difficult for the harasser to circumvent the block.  This adjustment should be very easy to make:  Just add another field on the Blocked List feature page.  Thanks in advance for your quick implementation of this feature.  This would make it safer for everyone on Facebook.  LASTLY:  FACEBOOK SHOULD INSIST ON PROOF OF IDENTIFICATION BEFORE ALLOWING ANYONE ON FACEBOOK.

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by :
Doc V Maulana Al-banjari
Carlos Emmanuel Jean-Gilles
http://virgomaulana.blogspot.com/