Passwords and Patriotism

Followers of Reddit would probably have seen this today, a display of blatant ignorance and old-fashioned thinking. This woman is as uneducated as her kid is on cock and balls (one would hope), and is, in my opinion, being anti-patriotic. Not that I support patriotism, I mean, it caused two world wars (and nearly a third), right? Patriotism is a divider, and this video is a clear demonstration of how to isolate yourself from everyone around you. This woman is pathetic and ignorant of the fact that what makes Britain Britain today is its multiculturalism. In fact, it’s not how long you’ve been here that determines whether or not you’re British, it’s a British passport. So get over the skin colour and the behaviour, and recognise your narrow-mindedness, please.

I believe the only constraint in password creation should be the minimum length of characters. Entities which place restrictions on what characters you can use in a password only serves to reduce the possible combinations of passwords one can have. I have heard that some systems don’t even allow you to use uppercase characters or spaces, and limit you to X number of characters? For fuck sake.. This comic sums up my predicament nicely – we’ve got to the point where passwords are easy to crack by computers, but hard for us to remember. You may remember my mnenomics post discussing how to remember things more easily. So try it with passwords. Think you can’t remember a 16 character password? Think again:

BigFatVaginaFace – 16 characters

HungLikeATicTac – 15 characters

WhatTheFuckPassword – 19 characters

I reckon you could spend 5 seconds looking at these before being able to write them all down. Give it a try. Of course, dictionary-based attacks would be more effective on these passwords than if they were random characters, but to be honest, with a password like that, the weaker ones will be hit first. And if you wanted to make it more difficult (impossible), just replace a character or two with a number or symbol. You don’t have to go full retard with passwords like $#@PUQEIDOPUEI$#%$, because you’ll just end up writing them down. How fucking useful is that?

My other issue regarding passwords is password rotation. Sure, if you use passwords like ‘BigFatVaginaFace’, this probably won’t be an issue for you, because you’re creative and choose ‘sensible’ passwords. But remember, the majority of the population are absolute fucking dip shits when it comes to choosing a password. What’s worse is forcing them to change it every, say, three months. It’s pointless against preventing password disclosure, because a hacker would not need one and a half months (average) to get the information he or she needs from an organisation. And forcing dip shits people to change their password four times a year will lead to weak passwords and high support costs. People will be more willing to write them down, and many of them, giving attackers an idea of how these dip shits people form passwords. If you’re really worried about password leakage, lock down from where people can access certain systems, and when someone leaves an organisation, turn their account off. Simples.