Technology fun with family

[47of74]

An older relative locked up a couple of her accounts and was bugging me repeatedly while I was working to drop every fornicating thing and help her unlock them.  I reset her passwords. and made up new ones for her. 

Both of them now contain swear words. 

 

[RosyDaisy]

Ohhhhh.....I like the way you think! I may start doing that myself.

[47of74]

5 hours ago, RosyDaisy said:

Ohhhhh.....I like the way you think! I may start doing that myself.

Of course if AT&T had been involved I would have needed to pick something else out.

Quote

AT&T's policy barring obscene passwords is surprising because it's completely unnecessary, even for a company that bends over backward not to offend even its most modest customers or employees. If workers are following standard industry practices, passcodes will never be shared with customer support representatives or engineers either verbally or in e-mails. Instead, plain-text strings such as "shittypolicy" will be cryptographically converted to strings such as "eaf6f87e9d009cd3c713e6533ce8b15ac9ed2009" that in theory can't be mathematically reversed. Sure, it's a good idea to block the use of expletives, but that has nothing to do with their potential to offend. The reason to bar them is that they're generally so short and widely used that they're easily cracked.

Interestingly, the admonition seems to be poorly enforced. Ars was able to choose passwords that contained several naughty phrases including "Fuck_4_Duck" (minus the quotes) and "Fuck_Shit_Penis," the latter of which AT&T rated as an "excellent" password choice. The strings "shit," "fuck," and "fucker" were blocked but only on the grounds that they were weak, since they contained fewer than six characters or didn't contain a mixture of numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and symbols. Even still the passcodes "fucker1" and "fuck3r" worked just fine. Go figure.