I've been meaning to upload this for a while... ever since the last outage from our ISP in fact. This is for you if it's a situation you can relate to. Our ISP went down; the lad complained to his mum; she complained to me. I then went on a much-un-needed fault-hunt. I finally gave in trying to find a fault within our home network and tell her "It's not our network... it's our ISP". I then get the response "Well I've checked their web-site and it doesn't say there's a fault". Of course it doesn't! they're not going to tell you when something is wrong at their end. They could already be aware and have called on their network engineers to fix the issue; and their webdevs are too busy working on the next new-but-slightly-less-usable version of their website to take time out and stick up a banner that says some users have reported faults this morning. It was at that point I realised all I need is a graphic on my website that says our home network is fine. Next time the conversation will go "well our website says our home network is fine, so there mustn't be a fault at all... have you tried turning your device off and on again?"
Also it's been a while since I checked haveIbeenpwned, a great site to check if your email address and password combination has been included in any data breaches. Since last time I see they have now added a section where you can put in your password to see if it's a risky one to use. It reminds me of a teacher I met who got his colleagues to try their passwords in his password-strength-tester program. It simply generated some random number and told the user their password would take X number of hours to crack... and while it did that, it sent their passwords out to a text file for later use. Not that I'm suggesting haveIbeenpwned are doing that; I'm just suggesting you use your password until you get notified that it's been included in a breach rather than entering it into unknown programs or websites. If you want to be really secure, try changing it every month without just adding the numbers 01 through 12 onto the end.
