
UserID’s, Passwords and PIN’s
How many UserID’s and passwords or PIN’s do you have set up?
It Used to be Simpler
It seems that passwords are getting a bit more simple by having most people just use their e-mail address when a new one is created. Of course, there are many sites that want you to create a unique UserID that isn’t an e-mail address as well.
I can count a total of nine different UserID’s I have for various applications, systems or web pages.
But passwords and PIN’s…that’s a whole different story.
It used to be that I had two passwords and two PIN’s. One password/PIN for business and highly confidential things (like my ATM card) and one password/PIN for on-line things, like setting up an account on Amazon.
It was bad enough when PIN requirements started to vary between 4 and 6 digits, requiring me to set up multiple PIN numbers. But then a number of factors made passwords a LOT more complex:
- Comcast did nothing to prevent automated applications from trying endlessly to figure out passwords, so if you had a Comcast e-mail address (or two or three), you had to come up with a more sophisticated password to avoid being hacked (yes, I was hacked and my password consisted of a misspelled word and numbers and it still wasn’t secure).
- Some systems required a password with a special character – F%CK!
- Some systems required that no part of the password contain a real word – PHUCK!
- Some systems required that both upper case and lower case letters were used – Fuck!
- Some systems required the password contain a number (or numbers) – 4FuckSake!
- Some systems required that the password was 8-12 characters long – fuckkkk!
- Some systems required that the special character or number(s) were embedded in the middle of the password – o4FuckSake!
- And of course, some systems required that there be no special characters, or no numbers or no upper case letters – wtfwtfwtf