Thursday, November 6, 2008
I have a friend who has a ridiculously simple password that he uses for almost everything. Now, I’m not going to get into all the many reasons that this is a bad idea. You already know that you shouldn’t use the same password for everything, right? And that you shouldn’t use something really easy to guess, like your wife’s name or your phone number, right? Anyway … We started joking about some potentially really bad passwords.
See if you can match the really bad password with the following celebrities:
| Person |
Really Bad Password |
| Bill Gates |
bucs |
| Sarah Palin |
masters |
| Jon Gruden |
change |
| Tiger Woods |
moosegal |
| Barack Obama |
microsoft |
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
For many years now I have been delighted that the words “username” and “password” are the same length. A fixed-width font in a text file full of server addresses, usernames, and passwords therefore looks quite organized.
Friday, January 4, 2002
I recently changed my SHELL / FTP passwords at DreamHost because of the little Blogger security breach. (I don’t use Blogger any longer, but I thought I’d be on the safe side.) Customer Support sent me the following message:
After looking further into your account it was discovered that you only changed one character between your old and new password (and that being the 10th character in your password). However UNIX password encryption only cares about the first eight characters. Thats why you should probably limit your password to 8 characters because anything after the 8th character doesn’t matter.
“A UNIX password can be up to eight characters, any extra characters will be discarded, making the passwords ‘Still won’t talk, eh, Spiff?’ and ‘Still wo’ mutually interchangable.”
