Pastor: Free, Simple Password Management for Mac

PastoriconIf you’ve been reading much about security recently, you know that everyone is saying to never reuse any passwords, and to use a password manager to keep track of all of them. 1Password is definitely the most recommended password manager of them all, as it supports categories, cross-platform syncing, and browser extensions.

But it’s $40.

Ladies and gentlemen, enter Pastor. I’m going to say now that Pastor doesn’t have any of the fancy features that 1Password has, but it has the essentials: password storage and encryption.

pastor

The interface is beautifully simple: You can add an entry that contains a title, username, password, URL, and a note. The database is then saved as an encrypted .pastor file using a master password of your choice.

To see your passwords, open the file, type in your password, and you’re there. You can copy a password to the clipboard for use, or hover over the password to see it.

It also has a built-in password generator.

The app is donation-ware, so donations are encouraged. I don’t usually ask people to donate for donation-ware apps, but this app is so simple and useful that I think it’s definitely worth more than nothing. So if you use this app, please donate something!

Enjoy!

Pastor Homepage

How Secure is Your Password?

I was doing internet-type things and stuff when I stumbled across this clean, simple, and useful website:

http://howsecureismypassword.net

It’s simple. You type in your password and it estimates how long it would take a standard desktop PC to guess your password based on the length, words, characters, and numbers that you’ve entered.

Even better, it tells you what you should fix. It will say if it’s too short, or if you need more characters, or if it shouldn’t be based off of a word. It tells you how secure your password is then tells you how to make it even more secure.

It also has a database of the most common passwords that it compares to. So if your password is under that category, you might want to seriously reconsider your online security situation.

These are all nice, but there’s one part that I absolutely love: The background. If you put in a super awesome, secure password, it will turn green. It does this by checking the password against the database, and if it’s good, it returns it to javascript which then changes the background color. The background color change is a nice, even fade thanks to CSS3 transitions, and they even bothered to add in entries for webkit, mozilla, and opera. Oh how I love CSS transitions.

And their font is nice.

http://howsecureismypassword.net