oh dear... i learned a great lesson in an IT class I took this semester... passwords should be 6-8 characters composed of letters, numbers, and symbols. Use both upper and lower case letters. There are plenty of password sniffing programs that can quickly sniff any word(s) that are in a dictionary of any language. Also, passwords should be changed every 4-6 weeks. Most of us know this due to our corporate computers prompting us to do so, but unfortunately home and web based applications aren't so user protection friendly.

And as someone else said, assuming the web is a safe haven is unfortunately a wrong assumption. It's a lil festering pot of wrong doing. Of course you will find plenty of good sites... but there are lots of bad ones and bad people lurking on the other end of the cable.