Monday, June 27, 2011

What's the Password?

I have so many passwords now, it's getting confusing. Used to be that passwords were like pins and only have 4 digits or characters. Remember PINs? Personal Identification Numbers? Banks used them a long time ago for ATMs. The unemployment office still uses them. Your password or PIN is limited to 4 characters. Most companies have made them longer in order to make it harder to guess a password. Now most have to be at least 6 characters long. They must contain at least one letter and at least one digit. Some require at least one capital letter. Some even require one capital letter, one digit AND at least one special character. A lot of them will test your password when you are changing it. The strongest one will have one capital letter, one digit, one special character like % or *, but not @ or any slashes, and 5 other alphanumeric characters. I try to have one Uber-password and then insert a digit and a special character in it. So then what happens? Constant Contact will not allow any special characters. I tried a about 10 passwords and then had to call the company because I couldn't sign in. After I called, I remembered, oh, they don't require a special character, they don't even allow it!

Life is getting so com#pl!ic@ted (complicated).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey - I am certainly delighted to discover this. Cool job!
Very Kooooll.