With the Internet growing bigger and bigger by the day, people have started thinking, what if someone tried to steal precious information from them, like credit card numbers or important phone numbers? Each individual gives another meaning to the useful information, but all of them agree with this: there are some pretty important things that must be kept safe and far from any danger. This is how password-management software was born.
With this kind of programs, you could easily create and manage passwords, so that you and only you can have access to them. But some of the pieces of software in this category have gone further, providing the users with the possibility to generate a password by themselves, memorize it, and then keep it safe until they need it. PasswordAnywhere is such a piece of software, indeed very useful when one really needs to keep their precious information safe.
The Looks PasswordAnywhere is created in the Java programming language, so it is available on multiple platforms. Because of that, the menus have been kept to a minimum and are very scarce. There are some File and Help tabs, but they do not have any functionality for the program.
It might be difficult to understand how to use PasswordAnywhere when first starting it, but the help file is pretty complete and useful, so that you can easily find useful information in order to understand how everything works.
The Works When you first enter PasswordAnywhere, you will see that it needs the site that you want to generate a password for. The site is required in order for the program to create a unique password strong enough not to be recognized after any malicious attack. Aside from the site, you also need a username, and a password that can be used to log to that site, or to manage and control anything you do with PasswordAnywhere. The password set here serves as a master password that you can change at any time.
Below these settings, there are the five-character sets among which you can choose. The passwords that will be generated by PasswordAnywhere will take the form that you give them here. You have the alphabet letters, uppercase and lowercase ones, available here. These are commonly used by most of the people when choosing a password.
But PasswordAnywhere gives you the chance to generate passwords that are difficult to break. In order to do so, you can use numbers, symbols and spaces. It is much more difficult for anyone to break a password such as “ &%~<-!,” instead of a usual name or word.
There are also some hash algorithms that you can employ, each one giving a different shape to your password. You can try to play with them, in order to choose the right combination that will give you the desired password. In other words, password strength relies on the hash algorithms that you choose. There are also some Cipher algorithms that can be employed in combination with the hash algorithms in order to further increase the strength of your password.
Below these fields, there is a place where you can see the generated password in real time and even make changes to it, if you want to. Also, if needed, you can immediately mask the password should someone come near you when working with PasswordAnywhere. Masking the password is also useful if you want to be the only one that knows the code generated by the program.
PasswordAnywhere also gives you the option to choose the password length. The length of your password is unlimited, so PasswordAnywhere can create for you a password containing as much as thousands of characters. All you have to do is decide how much security you need for your information, and PasswordAnywhere will give it to you.
The Good PasswordAnywhere is a pretty unique program, giving you access to some powerful password-generating tools. And all of that is for free, since it’s licensed under the General Public License (GPL). You can use various algorithms and character sets in order to generate the ultimate, unbreakable password that suits your needs. Also important is that you have no length limit, so you can choose to generate a password containing hundreds of characters.
The Bad If there is a bad thing about PasswordAnywhere, that would be its interface and how it’s presented to you. In other words, everything is put in a single place. PasswordAnywhere should have more space between the fields that give you access to the program's features, thus becoming a better looking software. But it has been developed in Java, so we may think that the poor interface was the price to pay in order for the program to be platform-independent. Or not...
The Truth
PasswordAnywhere may not look good, but it does what you need it to. PasswordAnywhere generates any password, you can choose between lots of algorithms in order to get the much-wanted password, and you can also make some changes to it at any time. So, if you will ever need a quick and portable solution to generate passwords, I would definitely recommend PasswordAnywhere.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
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Version reviewed:
Features:
(4/5)
