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[eerr]

Who is giving computer scientists the idea that,

Forcing people to make unrememberable passwords, is a good idea?

[lordcooper]

inb4 xkcd

[Sensei]

inb4 xkcd

...
Dammit.

Edit: You know what, posting anyway.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Flying Dice]

inb4 xkcd

...
Dammit.

See above.

[eerr]

I totally walked into my highschool programming class one day, and met the guy who draws xkcd.

He only draws stuff that people suggest to him.

[Sensei]

hey guys i met master chief in real life it was total cool

Edit: XKCD is written and drawn by Randall Munroe. From the About page:

I'm a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts.

Double Edit for Further Schooling:

I don't use submitted comic ideas and I have already heard about every company making human hamster balls and any news story about velociraptors.

inb4 "You got trolled so I win."

[Flying Dice]

Guys, my roommate is the God-Emperor of Mankind. Just sayin'.

[Gatleos]

My password is an entirely made up word with >=10 characters in it, which I probably won't ever forget since I've been using it for years. That's at least 36¹⁰ possibilities with the information I've given so far. Good luck figuring it out before the sun burns out and collapses on itself.

[Putnam]

My passwords all look something like a1OAiVU9.

[JoshuaFH]

Who is giving computer scientists the idea that,

Forcing people to make unrememberable passwords, is a good idea?

What bothers me even more is that there isn't even a consistent consensus between the ideologies. Some want capital letters, some want numbers, or more than one, a certain length (BUT NOT TOO LONG!), and special characters. I'd have one password for all websites, but I have to modify it slightly for alot of websites, and then it's a task just to remember which variation of the same thing I used at what particular place.

My passwords all look something like a1OAiVU9.

You are a god among men though for memory.

[Putnam]

I have a different one for every site too.

Hint: It involves using the site url and a single password that I've memorized as seeds

[Skyrunner]

Anyone know why hashes are irreversible? o_o

[Aqizzar]

I use variations on two basic passwords for everything, rapidly paring it down to one.  However, it's a string of random letters, easily accented with whatever it needs accenting, that I can remember.  Of course, it's no more useful for stalling a computer guessing at it than any other password under a dozen characters, which is a moot point.

A friend of mine used to use "The Matrix has you." for his password on everything.  I thought it was dumb, but it's not like anyone would ever specifically guess it, and it would take a computer several centuries to randomly arrive at it.

Of course, many password protected things on the Internet only give a unique IP like three tries a day to get a password right anyway, for exactly this reason.  What's stupid is when a server or organization requires you to regularly change your password, and like in the case of my college's old email server, you can't use any password twice.  That's just fucking retarded.

[JoshuaFH]

What's stupid is when a server or organization requires you to regularly change your password, and like in the case of my college's old email server, you can't use any password twice.  That's just fucking retarded.

Oh man, I remember this now. Except for where I was it, it was you can't use any of the three previous passwords, so I had four passwords that rotated every three months or so.

[kaenneth]

When I was BBS'ing back in middle school, I went by "James Bond", with the password ">007<"

Someone else at school also did BBS's, and gave me the number for the one he usually called.

So, I called it an tried logging in (back then, a failed login attempt would usually prompt to create a new account)

"James Bond", ">007<", logged me in.

hmm, I didn't remember ever calling that BBS before... huh, and already private messages received?

Turns out, not only was there already a user with "James Bond" as a psudonym, and NOT ONLY did he use the same password (I thought I was clever with the angle brackets), he was the guy at my school who gave me the number!

So yeah, your password might not be as good as you think.