361–370 of 665 posts
i deduced my dad's password when I was a middle-schooler. The uni micro had a teletype and although it did not echo password characters, if you mistyped your password, it would print the mistyped password, and knowing a bit about my dad, I could figure out what the correct password was. I logged in and sent himself an email reminding him to use a better password.
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Yes, creepy sexists need our protection and it's exactly the same thing as playing farmville on the bathroom.
You know, it's quite possible for multiple people to be "wrong" in a given situation. It's possible both the employee and the sysop to be wrong.
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In this hypothetical example are you walking over and saying good morning to each of your male coworkers as well? The point is, treat your coworkers the same, regardless of gender.
I haven't been in the workforce very long, so I really don't know and am asking genuinely. Is it ever okay to flirt with a coworker?
The rule of thumb is sort of in line with telling a risque joke. Is that ever OK in a workplace? Sure, but if there's any doubt whatsoever how it will be received by the audience then you probably shouldn't be doing it.
I had a password for an old school system (which I wrote) that was "any 21 characters where the 21st character is a 'z'". People would watch me type it (mashing 20 keys then the 'z') and be amazed I could remember a password that long.
I discovered that's the way my banking app actually worked until only a few updates ago. The password was originally limited to 8 characters (why this was the case for an online bank password is beyond me) but the app would allow you to enter more characters into the password input. It only accepted the first 8 characters though so anything you entered after those was ignored. I discoveres this when I mistyped my pas…
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Just to be clear, I agree, and I think what the person I'm replying to did is totally kosher. But I just think the fact that my password is private should not just be within technical limitations. If you find my password is "hurtmedaddy" I have a reasonable expectation to privacy about that beyond what SHA can and can't protect me from, and I would hope it's not showing up in some weekly report to be shared with IT.…
I personally would not have any expectation that my work passwords are private. I would expect, say, Google to keep my password private, and have internal controls around not letting people see my password, or leak it to the outside. But I'd have no expectation that my boss or IT department didn't have the ability to find out what my password was if they wanted. For strength of security, I really hope they're hashing…
Back when I worked in IT many years ago, one of the things I did each week was run JohnTheRipper on our password file. If it cracked your password, it sent you an email saying your password was weak and you had to change it. If you were in the next week's batch, it emailed you and told you "your password is foobar, which we discovered by cracking the password file, and it is weak. You must change it". Yes, I emailed…
I don't know what to think about this. A password is supposed to be secret so I don't know what a naughty phrase in secret is a violation of? It is not very different from writing something naughty in a private diary, or even thinking a naughty thing.
The system being managed here is a professional one. Keep your professional passwords professional.
It's no different than using your work email for naughty discussions.
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I really like the logic behind this one: https://www.xkcd.com/936/ It also doesn't require any special characters and its quite easy to remember.
The only knock on this strategy is that the more people adopt it the less effective it becomes (crackers will just start trying combinations of common words). The up-side is there are more 4-word combinations in English using only the 10,000 most common words than in any 8-character password, so even if crackers targeted the strategy specifically it's more costly to crack.
I use a diceware[0] passphrase for my Keepass database. I was inspired heavily by XKCD comic 936[1]. My only issue with password managers is that they are a single point of failure and are juicy targets for hackers, so I usually vet them and audit them thoroughly before I use them. I am one of those rare people that actually looks at the source code of password managers to look for flaws in the implementation (I some…
This is also something I see quite often on mobile phones with a pin/pattern unlock: you can often infer the pin from the wear pattern, or the grease marks on the screen if the phone was used recently.
My keycap wear pattern more or less mirrors the letter frequency in the languages I write.
Did anyone bother to ask Ken’s permission first before publishing his password on the public internet? Based on his reaction he clearly didn’t mind, but still!