Can the world please standardize passwords?

e.g.

- some sites require 8-12 characters. Why limit it to 12? - some sites require a number, a letter (upper and lower case), and some punctuation - some sites do not allow punctuation - some sites cannot handle upper/lower case

With the hundreds of passwords people have to remember, it is impossible to satisfy all the requirements. So that means it's impossible for many people to remember their passwords.

The worst possible violation of a secure password is to "write it down". This argument goes for password managers as well (which only work on the device that holds them). Same deal for having the browser remember your password. Not secure at all.

Banks and finance institutions are the worst offenders. They if anyone should be able to agree on what constitutes a password.

Passwords are with us for the long term. My mother is not going to use certificates to talk to her web banking.

And logging into Facebook is hardly a solution either. That's the last body that should be controlling authentication. Privacy? What's that?

So where are the global standards?

Ugh... Thanks for listening... Peter

My couple of password manager files encrypted and stored on Dropbox disagree with that one. (A couple of different ones because I like to segregate them by criticality. So I don't have to unlock the one with critical information most of the time. Reduces the attack surface.)

I can access them anywhere. Although I try not to access them on anything I don't have control over. For example: I memorize my dropbox password and my student login separately.

And it's a whole lot more secure to have a couple of long passphrases to unlock long generated passphrases for every site than to have a short password/passphrase for every site.

Yeah, if I am projecting my screen in front of an audience of 300, I do not want my password echoed. But when I am using my mobile phone, getting feedback is far more useful than guarding against someone reading my screen.