The Anonymous Widower

Passwords

The BBC has an article on their web site today about passwords for Internet sites.

I go in to lots of sites and there are some I never use as their security doesn’t suit me.

If a site insists, I use a shift to enter a password, then that company doesn’t get my business. I think that Verified by Visa insists on this, so I never use my Visa card on-line. So if I see an on-line transaction, when I check my Visa account, I know it’s fraud.

Incidentally, I think it’s a good idea to only use one card for on-line transactions and keep that secure in a close place by your computer.

My passwords are generally based on phone numbers, that I remember from my childhood, which were like the classic Whitehall 1212, which was Scotland Yard. You can check your password here. They say, that it would take a PC a thousand years to crack one of my passwords. But even my immediate family wouldn’t probably have known the number.

And all it was was an old London phone number.

Even the last phone number I had in Suffolk, which was Thurlow 789, would take a computer 10 days. The previous phone number at Debach, which was on a small exchange called Charsfield and was just three digits, would take a thousand years. Unless of course you had my details from the 1970s.

Incidentally, if I translate my current phone number, back to the exchange name that would take 27 years.  If you want to translate your London number, there’s a list here.

So it would appear you can be both lazy and secure!

December 2, 2013 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, News | Internet, Security