The Guadalajara Reporter

Misplaced passwords: my single biggest issue

Regular readers of this column may feel the urge to throw some of my earlier comments back at me, because I did write here that I was going to try to avoid droning on and on about passwords and the need for everyone to use cryptographically strong ones.  Try though I may, I simply cannot escape the fact that passwords are the single biggest issue I am forced to deal with day in and day out.  Often at the end of the day I realize that out of a workday when I should have spent eight hours fixing problems and helping people, I actually passed an hour or two unproductively while someone tried to find some misplaced password.

It used to be much easier to remember passwords when banks and other online sites permitted users to use short, simple and easy-to-remember ones.  Increasingly, though, most online sites are absolutely demanding that users change their password and are instituting rules such as passwords must have at least 12 characters and contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.  Many sites will simply no longer allow users to use short passwords and are enforcing this as a matter of policy.  One unnamed Information Technology professional proffered that today a “password must contain upper and lowercase letters, a number, a plot, a protagonist, some character development, and a surprise ending.”

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