Passwords now have to be so secure you need to be a genius to remember them. Source: Sunday Style
YOU can record a show on telly without even being home, or talk to someone on the other side of the world while sitting in your car, or run an entire office without using a single sheet of paper, or wake up to a device that will tell you how many hours you’ve slept, and how deeply, or carry around 10,000 books on a device slimmer than a hardcover copy of just one of them. There are so many new, extraordinary things in the world, yet it seems there is always a price to be paid that sucks a little bit of soul from your body.
Take passwords.
I mean, please, really, take them. I don’t want them any more. Because I can’t handle the pressure. I have, frankly, been pushed to the brink by EVERY SINGLE FRICKEN thing I do on my computer, or phone, or bank, or at work, requiring a password. I mean, if it was just a sequence of numbers, it would be fine, but now it seems every website or transaction requires an increasingly complicated multiple digit/include a capital letter/and a number/seven-letter foreign word that can only be read upside-down by an encryption wizard wearing dyslexia goggles, which I am then expected to memorise, but not write down anywhere, and then change every month, as though I am the character Russell Crowe played in that Beautiful Mindfilm, so that my entire existence is based around devising and remembering ever-more-complex mathematical formulae.
Really, are these people serious? I am assuming that there are people behind these recommendations, but maybe they’re not.
Maybe it’s the dreaded bots (the ones who apparently can’t read words written in drippy font on a computer screen) dreaming up these unsustainable password-producing demands.
Because, whoever — or whatever — it is, they seem to know very little about the way humans think.
See, the whole never-ending password cycle has actually backfired with me. I have been so beaten down by the constant hanging/remembering/forgetting/resetting cycle of my 329 passwords, that I now don’t change mine at all.
At my last job, I actually stopped accessing my work emails because I lost the will to reconfigure my password every week.
Basically, I just opted out. And you know what happened? After I got through the initial phase, where techs and office managers were dropping by (in person!) to see if there was anything wrong, I gained an hour in my day.
Yes, it actually freed up my time, because I didn’t have to wade through a daily litany of whose birthday it was, what building works would be happening, the latest excuse for why the office lifts weren’t working, reminders that the charity chocolate box was eight dollars short, marketing strategies being implemented in Far North Queensland by colleagues I’d never heard of, and what time we would convene for the hackysack competition/muffin bake/Denim Day extravaganza to raise money for whatever charitable event had co-opted that day.
Some IT trainspotter had expected me to religiously change a password FOR THAT?
Who did they think was going to hack into that email exchange; the dreaded International Boring Office Email Gang? And what, pray tell, were the evildoers going to do with the information they would gain by infiltrating it? Crash the all-staff gathering in the kitchen to celebrate Mandy from Accounts’ birthday?
Steal a slice of her Michel’s Patisserie black forest cake?
So this is where I’m at now. I use the same password ALL THE TIME. And the people in my office know it, so if they ever need to check anything on my computer, they can.
And if, perchance, a Romanian card-skimming gang of fraudsters ends up with access to my Asos account, I don’t care. In fact, it would be a relief, because such a security breach would actually mean it’s become a problem for Asos, whereas at the moment, it’s a problem for me.
I know what’s going to happen. People who are much smarter than me are going to email me, warning of what can happen when online security is breached. There will be terrible tales of money stolen, and identity fraud, and ensuing bureaucratic madness.
But I’ll have to imagine your correspondence. You see, I haven’t been able to access my Sunday Style emails since June last year, after my fifth password change in as many months.
I mean, I’d love to read them. But computer says ‘no’.
Source………
in www,news.com.au
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