Why is it important to have a strong password?

A strong password is a key way to prevent someone breaking in to your account or stealing your identity.

A strong password is one that is not easily guessed. It should have a combination of letters (both upper case and lower case), numbers and extended characters such as ! # ( ]. It should not be a word that is in the dictionary.

Some sites will give you a score that indicates how secure your password is. Don't rely on these. Here's why: next time you see one of them, enter in your street address as your password (no spaces between numbers & words). You'll likely get a score that your password is incredibly strong. Yet, someone who wants to break into your account could try it. Using an address as a password is a known pattern.

Notable Tidbits

This script works only in 4.0+ browsers. I cannot find a function in older JavaScript that can convert CHAR numbers to strings. Fortunately, this does not matter much anymore, but might impact people who love to run obscure browsers running on odd devices.

Here are a few of the key functions used in the code :

How I get my random number:

// between 0 - 1
var rndNum = Math.random()

// rndNum from 0 - 1000
rndNum = parseInt(rndNum * 1000);

// rndNum from 33 - 127
rndNum = (rndNum % 94) + 33;

How I convert random number to string:

textChar = String.fromCharCode(rndNum);

Get the password generator source code.