LoginCode is a great little free program that will keep your passwords for all your favorite web sites protected, as well as automatically logging you into those sites when you visit them. It is simple to install, supremely easy to use, and quite useful to those of us with more than one or two passwords.
Note that this program stores your password database locally on your machine, and does not upload them or otherwise make them accessible online.
Lots of people seem to think they don’t need more than one or two passwords. I used to be one of them, long ago.
I thought that if I used the same password for all my different accounts at different web sites on the internet, it would be simple and easy to remember it so I wouldn’t have to worry about being locked out of one of my own accounts. This plan was foolhardy, at best, and in the end result it did actually backfire on me.
When my password was stolen by some very unscrupulous people, it led to a pretty immediate and devastating situation of identity theft. Anyone who has been through anything even remotely similar will tell you, it’s a very tough situation to deal with and can take years to get everything back.
So, as I was struggling with that issue, it occurred to me that if I had kept different passwords for the different sites it would have made the whole thing considerably more difficult to pull off. They might have gotten one or two of my accounts, maybe, but they wouldn’t have been able to steal my identity wholesale the way they did. At the very least it would have slowed them down to the point I might have been able to catch the problem and stop it before it became too difficult. Alas, hindsight is always much clearer than foresight, it seems.
After that whole episode I began keeping different passwords for different sites. Since I sign up for an average of about five or six new sites a week, however, this was rapidly becoming more cumbersome than helpful. I got to the point where I had more than forty different passwords and I was constantly looking them up on my hand written list, and forever using the “I forgot my password” links at those various sites. While I did think that this hassle was better than the hassle of having my accounts compromised and my identity stolen, I was still getting pretty annoyed with the whole thing and more than once I considered going back to the dark ages when there were no web sites to sign up for. Between Facebook, Subjot, Twitter, Flickr, etc. etc. etc. it seemed like I spent more time remembering and typing passwords than anything else.
Since that obviously wasn’t going to happen, I started looking into other options. There are lots of browser programs out there, and most of them will offer to save password and user name information for you. The main problem with this option, however, is that all your passwords are stored in the browser’s data, which makes it rather un-secure, as far as a hacker of any talent and determination is concerned. Having the passwords stored in your browser is almost like waving a big red flag at a bull while calling it’s mother an ugly cow. Yes, I know they are cows, but that doesn’t mean you should call them ugly. It’s just bad manners, not to mention stupid and possibly suicidal.
So, the other option is to use a third party program to manage your password and login information. Now, I did a review recently on a program called Dashlane that will do this for you, but Dashlane also has tons of other features and uses besides just locking down your passwords and user names, and additionally will store and provide acees to passwords online, which some users will not want . If you don’t need all those other functions or options, it can be something of a pain to have to wade through them just to use the features you do want.
LoginCode is a small, free, simple and easy program to manage your various passwords. It keeps the information separate from your browser, secure and secret as they should be. Additionally, it will also automatically log you into those web sites as long as your information is still unchanged. If you do change your password and user name info, you will need to update LoginCode but that, like everything else, is very easy and quick.
The Verdict: If you have more than one or two accounts on the internet and you want to keep your passwords safe, LoginCode is a great way to do it. It’s free, it’s easy, and the development shows a lot of thought and care put into it. I use it myself, currently, and would recommend that you try it out at the very least. If it doesn’t mesh well with you or your system for some reason, you’ve not lost anything and you might just find that it makes your life easier.
[Thanks go to reader Panzer for letting us know about this program].
Get LoginCode here.
B.C. Tietjens
