Password Protect

Found this interesting list of common passwords (read: passwords you should never use) over at Yahoo. I would have never expected "beowulf," "polynomial," or "bicameral" to be common passwords. I'm not surprised at how many of the Seven Words You Can't Say On Television are on the list.

Now, I sympathize with the plight of network administrators wanting to protect accounts, data, etc. and fighting an uphill battle with us silly users who put the practical concern of being able to access the stuff over maintaining hack-proof security. Nonetheless, what do these people expect of us? Not exaggerating, I use 10 separate passwords just to do my job. Did I mention this is not a full time job? To make it more interesting, I have to change some of the passwords every 120 days or so and can't recycle passwords for 12 changes, making for about a dozen and a half passwords a year. Ideally, these should be 8 characters long, alphanumeric, and not words found in a dictionary. If network administrators really had their way, I would not use the same password for more than one application.

Remembering a solid password isn't so hard. Even remembering 10 solid passwords, usernames, and which application goes with which username and password is doable. What gets lost is the fact that the passwords and usernames are just security access. We actually have jobs to do on top of remembering passwords! Brain cells are a finite commodity, and we need to have some left over to remember why we were typing in the password in the first place.