Some people seem to love online banking and credit checking and what not, I don’t.  Doing banking online is just another way that people can get access to your credentials and drain your account, which is one of the reasons I don’t have a debit card.  One person likes using long passwords around 18 characters long which is not supported by the American Express website.

American Express limits passwords to 6 to 8 characters without spaces or special characters meaning letters or numbers only, which is my favorite kind of password, easy to remember.  I guess some people just like making life hard on themselves by coming up with impossible to remember passwords that they have to keep written down somewhere or maybe not.  Maybe it depends on how many passwords you have to remember that determines which type you use.

Snowulf goes on to explain why he likes using long passwords and why American Express should change just to suit his needs.  That’s not going to happen.  Most people like short, easy to remember passwords and for me, I have a hard enough time coming up with an 8 character password that I will remember much less something longer.

Then again, it also depends on what kind of information you keep where.  Sure, my eBay/PayPal passwords are slightly more complicated than passwords I use to login to Gmail or other online accounts but not by much, it still has to be something I can remember without looking on a piece of paper.  Speaking of which, I need to remember about 15 of the things most of which are relatively short but not necessarily easy to guess.

A few tips include not using your social security number, birthdate or any other personally identifiable number, in part or in whole, as part of ANY password.  I like to take phrases and numbers from shows I watch, mix and match them down to something that I can remember and use that, which doesn’t take much time.

You could use any number of password generators but those tend to generate a mish-mosh of symbols, letters and numbers that even an android would have trouble remembering much less a standard issue carbon based life form (humans, for instance).

In fact, a number of sites suggest a password between 6 and 8 characters and unless you are working for the CIA, NSA or other shadowy federal type agency then your password need not consist of much more than that, plus, and I know it’s a hard concept to accept, you can change your passwords from time to time just to make sure.

Short passwords make life easier if you know how to construct them properly and even if you don’t, there’s a 99% chance you will never need anything longer.  I guess, some people, like Snowulf there, like making things needlessly complicated.

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Entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 4:41 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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