Pointing the Finger – Password Blues

If you have been keeping up, you are aware that the passwords to approximately 10,000 Microsoft-related mail accounts (@msn.com, @hotmail,com, @live.com) were compromised, and put on a third party site for all to see.

Today, it has become popular for those who have seen the password lists to berate the holders of those accounts, many of whom have very easily guessed passwords. Perhaps they are to be taken to task – but – it might be a great deal easier for many if the list of characters was opened up a bit, instead of being simply alphanumeric.

I certainly am aware of the aids to keeping long, and random passwords for different sites, but I have yet to see one that makes it easy to see those passwords, in the case of an upgrade, or a lost filesystem. In an abundance of caution, most of these constructs keeps the revelation of the password from everyone, including you. Not very helpful when something crashes, and you can’t remember that password you need for that site you only visit every 4 to 6 months, yet need to get there badly right now.

Actually, Microsoft is better than some (think GMail or AOL) that don’t allow hyphens or underscores, because, at least with an underscore or hyphen, you are open to things that are more easily fixed in the human mind.  But really, there are many characters on the keyboard that most places don’t allow us to take advantage of.

Of course, there are those delimiting characters, which cannot be used, but other than those five or six, why are the others not allowed? We know the internet runs on Unix  or Unix work-alikes, so there should be none of the restrictions that Microsoft put us through with DOS filenames – besides, these are passwords, not file or directory names.

So if we are to escape the fate of the easily guessed password trap, perhaps some cooperation from the sites where the passwords are stored would be helpful.

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There’s a lot of people who want me to get out of acting and want me to run for governor. I think it’s mostly movie critics. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Now the reverse is true! This time it’s the people of California…

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