Passwords. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without them. No good moaning, we’re stuck with them, but what we can do is try and make sure we don’t make things too easy for those nasty cracker types who want to abuse our security. Luckily there are ways to improve our password strength, and this new tool can also help.

Telepathwords is a simple one page site which lets you enter in your passwords at which point it attempts to guess the letters you’re going to use next. The idea is if it can guess the letters, then so can an attacker, or at least it will be easier for them.

If the password you enter comes out with a big percentage of x, then your password is pretty weak, because it can be guessed easily. If it comes out with a majority of ticks, then your password is pretty good (not infallible of course).

The app also lets you know how many more ticks you need to convert from a weak password to a strong one, which is pretty useful if you’re thinking of beefing up your password. Definitely a nice little tool and one which instantly goes into our toolbox.

Oh and it’s from Microsoft Research. Nice to see them back with useful stuff again.