This One from The Baltimore Sun says in the digital age, people are on the verge of “password rage,” frustrated with the abundance of codes they are required to memorize to secure their various networked devices. And the pressure to update the numerical and alphabetical soup keeps growing as threats of intrusions, cyberterrorism and identity theft increase.
“Our brains virtually have infinite capacity,” says James L. McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine. “There’s absolutely no problem with capacity. We do have problems with interference. If you’re required to have eight characters with a combination of letters and numbers, and then you’re asked to change that every few months – jeez, how do you remember all that? It’s confusion.”
passwords suck
I use the same password for everything, where possible. At work I use a word followed by a number, that I increase by 1 each time I have to change my password. I try to avoid websites where I have to sign up yet again with a new user name and password that I’ll forget in five minutes. I probably have about 30 user names and passwords across the net and on my computers (work, home, laptop).
The sites I hate most of all are the ones that email you once you’ve registered with a completely random login password. Why not just allow me to choose my password straight up, and then have me click on a link to verify the registration? Why do I have to spend extra time fiddling around in settings to do this? auuugh.
I had a chat with the sys admin at work recently, who said that almost everyone uses the word and sequential number pattern. Security is going down the gurgler as passwords are constantly having to be reset because people can’t remember them.
Vicious (password security) cycle
Passwords are really getting ridiculous… and less secure. When people have to have too many passwords (or they are required to have long ones), they tend to use the same ones a lot, or use things that are easily guessed by people that know them. This decreases how secure the passwords are. In trying to make things more secure by requiring long passwords that are frequently changed, systems admin types actually end up inducing us all to choose less secure passwords. It’s a problem, but darned if I have any ideas to fix it!