September 12, 2014
Dear Everyone:
Lots of stuff in the news lately about
hackers getting into retailers’
computer systems and stealing people’s “personal data”, i.e., credit
card numbers and passwords.
The usual advice about using a different password for each account.
Seriously? Every time
you purchase something online, a new printer, camera, software, magazine
subscription for someone else, you’re required to “register” and start a
new account. I have a list
of all these accounts, 57 so far.
That’s three pages of
accounts and passwords, written down, of course, in a
Word document.
(And password-protected, to the extent that the computer requires a
password to get to the document.
For the record, the document doesn’t say what the actual
Userid
is or what the password is, just a “clue” to tell me which one I used
that particular time.)
Problem is, for most people, passwords are too easy to guess and too
hard to remember. Mother’s
name; father’s birthday. The
first phone number you ever memorized:
(NEptune 6-0000).
Make it a mix of upper and lower case letters and numbers that no can
guess, and no one can remember.
Then they came up with the “personal question”.
I first encountered this some years ago with
AOL (account still
on the list) when the system asked me to pose a question, followed by
the answer which only I would know.
That was easy:
Question: Who murdered the
two Princes in the Tower of London?
Answer: (Here’s the tricky
part.) Most people,
including a history major that I know, would say “Richard III”.
That would be the wrong answer.
The correct answer:
Henry VII. (Well,
technically, a lot of people think the
Duke of Buckingham did it
for Henry Tudor, but no one
will ever know for sure.)
The whole point is, few people would correctly guess that the answer is
“henry”.
But then they found out that a lot of people were making up some pretty
silly stuff that was taking up too much space in the system.
So they narrowed it down to some “typical” questions.
Favorite movie? Favorite
restaurant? Favorite
teacher? (Oh, please!
Up through the Sixth Grade they were all Sister Mary
Fill-In-Blank. Beyond that,
the only teacher whose name I can remember had parents who actually
named their child “Scholastica”.
No kidding.)
One person told me that his answer was easy.
Favorite movie:
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Only the answer was too long, of course.
Not to mention unacceptable “non-characters” like the period “.”
and colon “:”. And how did
he spell “doctor”? Capital
D, lower case “r”, period?
Or “D-o-c-t-o-r”? The first
systems were case-sensitive, which added to the confusion.
Then I overheard a couple of computer people talking about how you just
needed to find an answer, then use that for every question.
Take, for instance, “peony”.
What’s your favorite movie?
Peony. What was the name
of your first pet? Peony.
What was your childhood best friend’s first name?
Peony. What hospital
were you born in? Peony!
Of course, this assumes that you
can remember the correct spelling for peonies.
That worked for a while, until the programmers told the system to not
allow the same answer twice.
And they wonder why people choose “1234”, “abcd” or “qwerty”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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