You Want People To Have Strong Passwords? What Are You, Some Kind Of Communist?
#1
Passwords are a pain. If they are strong, they are hard to remember, and if you can remember them they probably aren't strong. Of course, there are all those excellent password managers out there, but using them requires an even stronger password.... No wonder, then, that time and again we hear of people giving up and using simple-to-guess passwords, and of the awful consequences that result.

Stefania Maurizi points us to an Italian journalist, Nicola Porro, who's also had enough. He's written a blog for the newspaper Il Giornale, in which he describes tech people who keep giving him a hard time over his weak passwords as the "new communists" (original in Italian):
Quote:So why do I say they are communists, and not just idiots? For the simple reason that they don't believe in free will, or in individual freedom. Can't I be free not to change my password every month? Can't I be free to use a simple password? Can't I be free to choose whatever the devil I like? Can't I be free to consider it irrelevant whether somebody steals my data? Isn't it an option that whenever I'm online they screw me over and steal precious information from yours truly and that I'm not at liberty to put myself intentionally in danger in order to have an convenient password?

He goes on to say:
Quote:and as for anyone who dares to say something about the risks of getting conned blah blah blah, I am quite happy to sign online once and for all that I accept full responsibility for any password theft.

I wonder if he's considered what might happen if his system were taken over as part of a botnet that took out a hospital's computer system, say, or were used to host and distribute child pornography: would he be happy about accepting responsibility for those too?
Maybe those sysadmins who keep bothering him to choose a decent password aren't "new communists", just concerned, responsible people who understand that every computer user connected to the Internet is necessarily part of an online community with responsibilities to everyone else there, just like in ordinary life. Choosing a good password is really no different from following the basic rules of the road: it's not a question of losing your personal freedom, but of showing consideration for your fellow human beings who may be harmed if you don't.



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#2
well the fact is "Most" peoples that "claims" to be an avid Internet citizen/user...."Mostly" will complains and spitting their mouthful shit to the services company where they have their things stored with the password when their password is stolen...and not mentioning the annoying repetitive complains "Kelp!!! my passwort iz changed?!!!"

and also on the service company side it will affect their credibility as "The Service You Can Trust and we keep your shit safe" which of course will affect their annual revenues...

quite "Capitalistic" actually rather than "Communist"
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#3
(Feb 11, 2014, 16:03 pm)Mike Wrote: Passwords are a pain. If they are strong, they are hard to remember, and if you can remember them they probably aren't strong.

Not necessarily true. As a matter of fact, usually not true.

[Image: password_strength.png]





Also, check out this blog post
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#4
^dangerous person
darn it!
now I got to change my passwords each for every 1 hour!
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#5
The XKCD comic is quite accurate. And its usually fairly trivial to add special characters or numbers into the password.
Some strong easy to remember passwords:

STARTREKdeepspace9!!!!!
NEONgenesisEVANGELION54321*
AllMenAreCreatedEqual13STATES
GERMANY0USA1circa1945

Most of my passwords are constructed similarly. It takes a couple usages to remember the passwords, but once I had them committed they proved to be fairly easy to remember and a lot more secure than shorter passwords like W0lFW!tZ3#. I would never remember that one.
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#6
I can't stand websites that force you to have a "strong" password and also require you to change it every few months. It is stupid and annoying and when those stupid websites do that i end up having to save the password in a text file on my desktop. I know tons of people who use sites at work that require a password change every month so they have all their passwords written on a piece of paper on their desk, which is also not secure.

I pretty much just don't save information that i don't want people to get on a website. I have my own system of double encrypted harddrive to store information that is private and never worry about changing the password because it would take years to brute force through both passwords.
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