Password Blues
I don’t know about the rest of you people, but I have my own system for managing passwords. I have certain passwords that I use for certain functions. The accounts I have at banks and things of that importance always get their own long, unique password that would be hard to break.
I also have a low level password for things that don’t matter a whole heck of a lot, like my accounts at social bookmark websites or my accounts at other social media sites. The way that I see it is if something gets compromised on there, then I will just create a new account. I think the incentive for hackers to crack those accounts is pretty low. It really wouldn’t be a big issue unless someone had a really trusted account with tons of followers who marched in unison to their every request.
Then I have some mid level passwords. Those are the passwords for sites that are important to me and would be a pain if they were compromised somehow. Maintaining lists of passwords is a necessary pain in the rear. Even if you use a program to save them, you still need a master backup.
The whole point of this post though was to rant about something that bothers me. An awful lot of the time, I will go to create an account at some website and the password I want to use is not within their guidelines for passwords. This is completely infuriating. The passwords I use are pretty long. I do this on purpose to make it even harder for brute force password crackers to figure mine out. It is going to take a computer a number of years to crack my better passwords. I usually change them within that time frame anyway.
The infuriating part is the fact that my higher security passwords are declined on some of these websites. The company actually has the nerve to tell me that my password cannot be longer than 15 characters. Screw you pal. I like long passwords. You guys are idiots for not accepting them. As far as I am concerned, there should be a much higher threshold on password length. There should also be more flexibility in terms of what you can put in there.
I skipped out on a service for a website that I like to visit that is called Intense Debate. Basically it is a script that some bloggers use to monitor their comments. You have to log into the system if you want to comment with your name. Otherwise, you just comment as a generic guest. Nobody gets to see your link back to your website if they are really interested in your opinions. I skipped out on this because the dumbass service requires that your password be 15 characters or less. The password I wanted to use was a few more than that. I just wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit today. I whipped the bird at my computer screen and took that person’s blog off my reading list. I am no longer a subscriber.
People are fickle. I guess I am too. This blogger probably thought he was doing something great when he decided to use that particular service for his blog. Well pal, you lost one reader because of their stupid password insecurity. This isn’t the only service this has happened with. There are a lot of them out there. I have just gotten to the point where I am fed up with companies not taking reasonable measures to make it easy for people to participate in things that the companies pretend to want participation in. If you actually want people to comment on your site, you should probably make it easy for them to do so. I was willing to sign up for intense debate so I could comment on that site. But, the second inconvenience of having to come up with a new low value password that I would have to record specifically for a rare service like this one was a deal breaker for me.
