Who Goes There?

Something probably close to many of us in this highly log-in-able world: a discussion of passwords.

We know we should use different, highly individualized passwords for every site, incorporating upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols to make them hard to guess...but we have so many things to log into, how can we remember that many passwords?

At my job before last, you had to change your password every few months, but you could reuse them, so I had two and I'd just switch back and forth. At my last job, you had to change every few months, and they couldn't repeat, so I wound up just adding one more character every time I had to change it.

It got pretty unwieldy after a while, so I decided to change jobs rather than try to remember the password. Let no one say passwords aren't important!

Personally, I rely far too much on my browser to remember passwords for me, in my Keychain. It's all good as long as I don't lose my hard drive (again), or find myself wanting to log in on another computer. And as long as not too many sites go the extra length for security by rendering the 'remember this password?' feature non-functional.

My current workplace does that. The browser remembers the password, all right, but the site refuses to accept automatically entered characters. It triggers a sternly chastising message.

It's for my own good, I know. And at least I can keep the same password forever, as long as I enter it by hand every time I log in.

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