For quite a while now, I’ve been participating in various on-line activities, many of which require passwords – I think it’s finally time that all on-line functions that require a password should be required to adopt a standard format for password definition.  And perhaps even formats for userid.

Critical Information – Critically Confusing

I work in the IT field.  I have been involved in various on-line forums and communities and social media sites for years.  I have online accounts with banks, investment systems, shopping web sites, web site building sites, blogging web sites, internet service providers, cloud storage, etc., etc., etc.

So you can imagine the mish mash of userid’s and passwords that I have to manage.

I thought I was clever early on, when I came up with a standard password for social sites and a different standard password for any sites or software where financial or private data might be stored.  Both of the passwords were complex enough to make it difficult to crack.

But then the standards started to change.

1. Some sites required a minimum or maximum number of characters that mine didn’t comply with.
2. Some sites required a specific special character that mine didn’t use (like a pound sign, for instance #).
3. Some sites wouldn’t allow any special characters.
4. Some sites required a number in a specific spot (not at the end, or only at the end).
5. Some sites only allowed for a PIN – some of those PIN’s were 4 characters, some 6 and some 8.
6. Some sites wouldn’t let you use any password that contained a word in the dictionary.
7. Some sites required a mixture of lower-case and capital letters and some even wouldn’t allow a password that started with a capital letter.

Just the second and third  item in the list above made it so you couldn’t possibly have a password that would comply with both.

And, of course, you don’t want to write down your passwords, because that’s unsafe (yes, people will look under your keyboard for passwords if they’re trying to break into your computer).

There are always softwares or apps that manager your userid’s and passwords, but it always scares the hell out of me that if that account gets hacked, they’ll have access to anything an everything until I change all my passwords.

And userid’s…don’t even get me started.  Can we just not use e-mail address as a standard for that?  And if you need more than one account, there are lots of free e-mail sites, like GMAIL where you can set up a secondary.  Trying to come up with a unique identifier that looks like your name is infuriating…I can’t even imagine how annoying it would be if my name was more common.

So please…for the love of the sweet baby Jesus…someone come up with a standard that everyone should be required to use!

Current Knitting

Ideally, I’d like to finish knitting about 18 London Beanies before May (which should be easy), but I’ve been working solely on those since the last blog entry anyway.

I will also need to block them all and create a care-tag for them so that the retreat center can sell them.  What kind of price tag would you expect on a hat like these?