Forcing users tp change their passwords is not effective

At a company I consult for, they change the password every month. Not on all systems but on at least two (both Windows). It's a pain, what's worse is that changing passwords regularly doesn't work. Here are my pet peeves for usenames and passwords:
  • User names or passwords that can't handle "special" characters. I like to use special symbols like @ or % but a lot of sites don't permit that.
  • User names or passwords that have a limited maximum length. Why can't I have a password thats 200 characters?
  • Passwords that are a fixed length. This actually makes it easier for someone to guess your password.
  • Passwords that can only be numbers, people end up using their birthday or social security number.
  • Passwords that can't be cut and pasted. Banks sometimes do this because they are afraid of keyloggers. I'm not against that if you are checking your account from an internet cafĂ©, but if you are on a trusted computer why not allow cutting and pasting a password?
  • Usernames that are assigned. Companies often do this. Sometimes one part of the same company gives you skirkwood another part kirkwood and another one scott. A company I work for it's easy to guess a username since they are all numbers are are given out serially.
One thing I do like are companies that give you an initial random password for your account. This is nice because you can use the given password for a while instead of being forced to come up with a new password on the spot, plus it forces you to learn how to change your password.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shortest Sudoku solver in Python

Mark Byer's site has some more Sudoku solvers here's a short one in Python that's only 178 bytes long: def r(a):i=a.find('0');~i or exit(a);[m in[(i-j)%9*(i/9^j/9)*(i/27^j/27|i%9/3^j%9/3)or a[j]for j in range(81)]or r(a[:i]+m+a[i+1:])for m in'%d'%5**18] from sys import*;r(argv[1]) On the site is also shown a longer Perl version at 185 bytes: use integer;sub R{for$i(grep!$A[$_],@x=0..80){%t=map{$_/27-$i/27|$_%9/3-$i%9/3&&amp;amp;amp;$_ /9-$i/9&&($_-$i)%9?0:$A[$_]=>1}@x;R($A[$i]=$_)for grep!$t{$_},1..9;return$A[$i]=0} die@A}@A=split//,<>;R I think the Python version is slightly easier to understand, although they are both quite cryptic. I'm not sure why I find these programs fascinating. I think it reminds me that any program can be written in such a way that it's cryptic, even in Python. In addition, the code is small enough that you should be able to figure out how it works, and may learn something the process. Related is
Read more

Seven Segment Display in Inkscape

Image
Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't handle
Read more

Dot to Png

Image
For fun I wasted some time creating diagrams using the dot language. It's pretty fast to get a diagram out, except that there are a lot of things you can't do, like make shadows or rounded and filled rectangles. With this dot code: digraph "User Clicks" { node [ shape="rectangle" style="filled" ] server [label="Server"] java [shape="ellipse" label="Java\nCode"] provider [label="Service\nProvider"] browser [label="Firefox"] browser->server[label=<&#9312; AJAX Sends Session ID>]; server->java[label=<&#9313; Confirms Session ID>]; java->provider[label=<&#9314; Makes HTTPS call>]; provider->java[label=<&#9315; Results>]; java->server[label=<&#9316; Results>]; server->browser[label=<&#9317; Results>]; } You can click on the image to see the SVG rendered in Firefox, if you use that. I wrote a little python program to call t
Read more