Christina Wilkins can’t use her home computer.
It’s not because the machine is broken, or because 29-year-old Wilkins has come down with a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome.
It’s because her fiance changed, and then promptly forgot, the password.
“The stinkin’ password.”
Who among us hasn’t forgotten one – or many? How much of our lives have we spent on the phone with customer service or the Information Technology guys in the basement, attempting to recover or reset a password?
Passwords, user names, PIN numbers. They’ve become the flies in the Internet ointment, spoiling a perfectly good communications concoction. The frustration computer users feel over these impossible configurations of letters, numbers and $pecils!gns has led some to repudiate the technology altogether – and has led others on a quest for the perfect password panacea.
Meanwhile, says one memory expert, packing our brains with this kind of rote clutter may actually be crowding out important stuff, “big picture” stuff, like, “Why on earth did Drew Barrymore wear that dress to the Golden Globes?”
For Wilkins’ computer, there’s only one cure, she says.
“We’re probably going to take it to Compaq and see if they can fix it.”
Grrrr. “Passwords”.
Say it like Jerry Seinfeld pronounced the name of his nemesis, Newman – spitefully, through gritted teeth – and you’ve captured the collective exasperation of a nation.
As much as we computer users hate to admit it, passwords serve a vital function. They keep private or privileged information private and privileged.
“People look at the lock on the door and think, “You’re preventing me from getting in,’ when actually the lock on the door allows the information to be kept” in the first place, says Mark Gilfand, president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals. “There’s a reason,” he adds. “We’re trying to protect this information from thieves.”
But it takes a real saint not to swear a blue streak after 87 attempts to recall one’s secret code for the company expense-report program or health-care account or Barnes&Noble.com. It takes a dedicated soul to commit all those character sequences to memory and not have them scribbled on Post-it notes stuck to the computer monitor.
“That kind of defeats the purpose,” says Gilfand.
Jean Manning is typical.
“I don’t write them down,” says Manning of her passwords. “I’m constantly putting the wrong password in the wrong program.”
The relentless song-and-dance made her feel “like a ditz.”
It got so bad that the “50ish” Manning decided to boycott the Internet altogether. Now she only has to worry about those shifty passwords she needs for work.
Passwords are “a pain in the rear,” says Ron Van Fleet, a forensic scientist in Fort Worth. “Every one of them has different rules . . . eight letters, must have capitals, must have numbers.” In his frustration, Van Fleet, 49, ended up going back and changing everything to one basic password with slight variations to suit the myriad requirements. Still, “I know I have some I haven’t used in years that are still out there,” he says.
Password forgetfulness costs companies money. Lots of it.
“Depending on the organization, you could be talking anywhere from $15 to $25 a call to change a password,” Gilfand says. There’s the IT person’s time (to verify that you are who you say you are before getting to the new password) and the employee’s time (the time to find the IT department’s phone number, to call, to leave a message, to wait until help arrives, to grab a cup of coffee and doughnut in the interim).
In a study of one particular company, “the 135,000 employees forget about 650,000 passwords annually, at a total cost of more than $6 million a year,” reported Newsweek in October.
The best way to remember passwords is also the worst way to come up with them: use something you’re really familiar with – your kids’ names, your pet’s name, your birthday, your address. Heck, why not use the same password for everything from banking to shopping?
This, says Gilfand, is what many people do, especially after experiencing the irritation of not being able to remember 20 different or more complicated passwords.
Unscrupulous hackers love it.
“Easy-to-remember passwords are easy to hack,” he explains. “A professional could crack that kind of password in as little as 10 seconds.” Add a couple numbers to it, he notes, and that might take the experienced info thief 10 minutes.
Computer automation makes it easy for hackers to run thousands of possible password configurations in seconds, says Matthew Ward, creator of the password manager Passward.
“It’s a numbers game,” Ward says. “If they try enough passwords and hit enough sites, they’re going to get somebody.”
Better than using names and dates that you’re intimately familiar with, try coming up with names and dates that you’re intimately familiar with and putting a twist on them. Add a random “&” or a “+”. That’s how Sandra Chapman does it.
Chapman, a memory specialist, is the director of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. She’s leery of all the “meaningless” information that modern technology foists upon our brains.
“To remember more than two or three random passwords is really impossible,” she says. “It’s really toxic for your brain. It bogs your mind down in terms of what really matters.”
Unfortunately, even grandmas have more than three passwords these days. A September survey of 1,700 technology professionals found that more than 25 percent of them juggle more than 13 passwords at work. Ninety percent of them are frustrated with what the press release euphemistically terms “the password-management challenge.”
In other words, passwords tick them off.
“People are really emotional about this password problem,” says Ward, on the phone from his Atlanta office. “Frustration arises from thinking you know what your password is, and it’s not that.”
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