(For a convenient list of links to all of the programs described in this article, see our .)

I wish to publicly confess a venial but pretty dumb sin: I often reuse usernames and passwords. All a malicious hacker has to do is get that combination from an insecure site--say, --and then brute-force it against other sites. (In my defense, my most important accounts--my e-mail, my banking, my Web administration--use unique names and passwords.)

In an era when you have to register a user ID and password to just to tell some random person on the Internet that they're wrong, it's virtually impossible to that meet the target of being "easy to remember, hard to guess."

Most modern Web browsers have a basic password-save feature, but looking outside the browser to specialized programs is usually a better bet. , a free and open-source program, offers a lot of tools and options for far more than just Web passwords. It has a nice system of categories (which you can extend with subcategories) for organizing passwords; it also supports third-party plug-ins and even scripts. Thanks to one free/donationware plug-in, , I was able to import all my stored Firefox passwords, which is crucial for getting me to actually use a program like this.