Margaret Thatcher is 110% sexy: Let Edward Snowden teach you how to choose passwords

How do you choose your passwords?

If it's your name or your spouse's name with a number tacked on, you're doing it wrong.

As a follow-up to last week's excellent interview with infamous security expert Edward Snowden, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver released some extra footage that didn't make the first cut: how to choose passwords.

A computer system can use what's called a "brute force" technique to try every word in the dictionary as a password - and then combinations of them, with numbers, and so on. Because it's a computer, that won't take it very long.

The key, Snowden says, is pass phrases, not pass words. They won't be in the dictionary.

When push comes to shove, though, Oliver confesses: "I'm not going to do it. It seems hard, even though I knowit isn't."

And Snowden, literally hiding in a foreign nation for his actions taken in the name of security, just shakes his head sadly. "You're killing me," he says.

If you missed Oliver's show on Government surveillance, the 30-minute segment is truly worth a full watch.

He puts the complex issue in simple, relatable terms, and even seems to give Snowden - in a surprise interview in Russia - a lot to think about.

HT: breakingnews.ie