Sunday 25 October 2015

For your internet security this post will self destruct in...

The worst thing about internet security these days is not that it is so unsafe in a big, bad digital world.

It's the passwords.

Every time you want to buy online from a website you use once every two years, put through codes from packets of cereals or post a reply in a vaguely interesting comments' thread, you have to register and pick a password for your new account.

Ok, so let's make it a standard password that I use for every such account...


Oh wait, this password has to have a capital letter, a number, a symbol and not end in 'a'.

But it can't contain my initials, two numbers in a row, a hash tag or a dollar sign.

Or a pound sign.

Or a 'K'?

Or a 69??

After half an hour of playing  a "make-a-password' game that seems to be a strange love child of sudoku and scrabble....

How about *********?

Great, here we go.

Oh no.

I misread the bunch of tiny squiggly "prove-you-are-human" letters that appeared for a second and typed them in wrong, so now I'm a bad robot and I can't have an account.

No worries, I can always start over, at least I have now chosen the password.

So I type **********  smugly.

"You can not use the same password twice."

...

I hate you, internet security AD2015.