It's as Easy as 123!@S
By JACOB BERNSTEIN June 22, 2012
WITH numbers. Without. One capital letter. None. More than eight characters. Fewer than 16.
"It's a nightmare," the comedian Tracey Ullman said. "These passwords just keep getting longer and longer. I try to think of a startling emotional thing that jogs my memory or something that's frightening, or my grandmother's name with 666 at the end. But I really don't know what to do."
Neither, it would seem, does the actress Parker Posey, who said she writes them down "on tiny pieces of paper, like little secrets, because yes, someone could find them." But then, Ms. Posey added, she forgets which Web sites the codes are for.
The writer Paul Rudnick finds himself equally bewildered. Simply tracking down the password for his Time Warner Cable modem was like "a 'Bourne Identity' moment," Mr. Rudnick recalled.
Just a decade ago, an Internet user rarely had to do more than enter a simple, easy-to-remember e-mail password, recycling it for every online account. But as our dependency on the Internet has grown, so has the complexity of its restrictions.
The end result: a mind-boggling array of personal codes squirreled away in computer files, scribbled on Post-it notes or simply lost in the ether. Virtually any online user without a computer science degree now seems to be one failed login attempt away from a nervous breakdown.
Worse, are the dreaded security questions, which began simply enough ("In what city were you born?") but have increasingly "moved from the purely factual to things that would require you to have a judgment," lamented Jeffrey Leeds, the president of Leeds Equity and a fixture on the New York social scene.
...
As with most things related to computers, what you think of as a personal itch has probably already annoyed someone else - and Open Source software, which is free-as-in-speech, showcases a great example of how /this/ itch has already been scratched.
It's called Password Safe, and it lets you remember *one* password that gives you access to all the other ones, stored safely with military-grade encryption.
You can download it, no strings attached, at
Bill Horne Moderator