Take Control of Your Passwords (1.1) SAMPLE

Introduction
Think of a card, any card. Now, keep that card in mind and think
of another. Repeat until you’ve picked 12 cards—but make sure your
selection includes all four suits, at least one ace and one face card, and
no two instances of the same card. Remember the whole set, because
I’m going to ask you again tomorrow…
I’m joking, of course. But have you ever noticed that when magicians
pull someone out of an audience to help with a trick, they never make
such complicated requests? It’s not reasonable to ask someone to
create a meaningless string of numbers and letters, remember it
indefinitely, and produce it on demand.
But Web sites, banks, and network administrators make exactly that
request of us almost daily. Want to buy something online? Sure, but
you need more than a credit card—you need a password too. Sync this
data with the cloud, sign up for that free service, manage your utilities
or PTA schedule online…no problem, but you must have a password
for that. “Make sure it’s between 10 and 14 characters, contains upperand
lowercase letters, at least one digit, at least one punctuation
character, and doesn’t have any repeated strings. Oh yeah, and don’t
even think about using a word that might be found in a dictionary or
reusing a password you used anywhere else.”
Are you kidding me? This is madness. Coming up with unique,
random passwords all the time, remembering them, and producing
them reliably is not the sort of task the human brain is cut out for.
Faced with this difficult and increasingly absurd task, people naturally
tend to look for shortcuts their brains can handle. They pick easy
passwords, like their kids’ names or patterns of keys on the keyboard.
Even if they go to the effort of creating something more complex, they
use the same password everywhere, because then they have only one
thing to remember instead of hundreds.
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