I also posted security warnings at the top of today's summaries to hopefully jolt some people into passphrase safety.
There is an article at Ars Technica which really woke me up to how unsafe some seemingly safe pass-phrases may actually be: How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking -- Crackers tap new sources to uncover "givemelibertyorgivemedeath" and other phrases by Dan Goodin - Oct 8 2013, 9:00am EDT.
That article made me reevaluate and change most of the pass-phrases I had been using on many different sites, including my banks.
In related news: today I discovered one of my collegues had taped off his webcam, because he was "afraid someone might be spying on him", but only snorted when I pointed out that securing his system with a four letter word wasn't all that safe to begin with...
gotta side with your friend on this one. you could have a 200 character password and the nsa could still break in ezpz. heck they can even break into a computer thats turned off. here are some links just to touch the tip of the iceberg
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries-open-computers-not-connected-to-internet.html?_r=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Secret-3G-Radio-in-Every-Intel-vPro-CPU-Could-Steal-Your-Ideas-at-Any-Time-385194.shtml
However a piece of tape over the camera is simple and foolproof.