Password stupidity is not viable

[Of course, it’s not stupidity. It’s fear and superstition, which often go together. First, the rant.]

It’s 2023. Main companies shouldn’t be posting guidelines like this:

This isn’t simply safety theatre. It’s a waste of time, the mathematics is mindless and it leads folks to create worse passwords, not higher ones.

If the one that maintains your workplace sprayed water on the entrance stroll simply earlier than the temperature dropped to freezing, you’d by no means stand for that. If the parents who filed your taxes merely made up numbers that felt like they made sense, you’d swap accountants.

If an organization can’t get this easy system proper, how can we belief them to make a fridge?

There’s loads of insightful, efficient desirous about on-line safety. Your group embarrasses itself when it hassles clients to interact in silliness like this. Stupidity is simpler to identify and repair than ever earlier than.

PS if that is damaged however seems advantageous to the boss, what else in your group is equally grounded in superstition or the established order?

[The challenge with tech is that the person doing the work often has a boss who doesn’t understand the work and isn’t willing to put in the time to do so.

Twenty years ago, I ranted about the forms that have a pull-down for US citizens challenging them to choose which of fifty states they live in, and country pull-downs that begin with Andorra and put two of the biggest ecommerce countries in the world at the end of a list of more than a hundred. There’s no good technical reason for this. It’s simply the way someone created a template at the end of the last century, and it’s easier to simply go along.

Now that AI is about to rewrite just about every rule of our culture, perhaps it’s a good time for the boss to commit to understanding it.]

October 7, 2023