Open Sesame
Passwords.
The bane of the Internet. We need them; and also hate the need to remember so
many of them across sites. One can’t use the same password everywhere because
it’s dangerous and also because each site has its own demands on the
length/nature of the password. Apple introduced fingerprint scanners on its
phones a while back to do away with the nuisance.
Of
course, no new method has caught on yet, so passwords are not going away
anytime soon. Besides, fingerprint scanners are not the solution for company
passwords. Imagine what happens if a 9/11 type of attack wipes out everyone at
headquarters. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to Cantor Fitzgerald, a
large financial firm, says Ian Urbana.
So
how did the company unlock those accounts? They found that most people’s
passwords have the following characteristic, says Urbana:
“Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief,
sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational
mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke
with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came
to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from
anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a
tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and
expressive.”
During
his research on how people select passwords, Urbana found a range of reasons
behind the choices:
“There was the former prisoner whose password includes what used
to be his inmate identification number (“a reminder not to go back”); the
fallen-away Catholic whose passwords incorporate the Virgin Mary (“it’s
secretly calming”); the childless 45-year-old whose password is the name of the
baby boy she lost in utero (“my way of trying to keep him alive, I guess”).”
At
times, the choice of a loved one’s password can even have emotional
repercusions!
“One woman described the jarring realization that her sister’s
name was the basis for all of their mother’s passwords. Another, Becky
FitzSimons, recalled needling her husband, Will, after their wedding in 2013
because he was still using the digits of his ex-girlfriend’s birthday for his
debit-card PIN.”
No
wonder then that the byline to Urbana’s article reads as:
“We despise them (passwords) – yet we imbue them with our hopes
and dreams, our dearest memories, our deepest meanings. They unlock much more
than our accounts.”
And
in the article he goes on to conclude that:
“The Internet is a confessional place.”
There was a news item saying that some company has invented a gadget that takes care of our trouble of having to maintain and remember a number of passwords. I don't know what the machine does yet, but the company is hopeful of marketing it to advantage.
ReplyDeleteWe, who actually belong to the previous century not the current one :-), ourselves have around 10 basic passwords with one standard variation, which leaves us with 20 passwords. We have devised a way to deal with passwords. We don't complain nevertheless we admit we just suffer passwords!
Coming back to what the company proposing the solution to passwords is that from your device you send the password to the machine by some simple operation. So, we are supposed to leave our trouble to one more machine. Soon, someone will invent a machine to take care of this device too. Let's wait for the day when one machine with one button will take care of all our machine needs, from morning to evening covering hundreds and hundreds of varying applications!