"What's the password?"

[vakkotaur]

The BBC is reporting survey results that indicate many people would be willing to reveal a password for a chocolate bar. Generally people don't like passwords unless they see a need themselves. And they really don't like having to have a bunch of different passwords, and then have to change them constantly. It gets to be hard to keep track.

I have a story of a couple passwords, now long expired and not re-used in case anyone is wondering. It started when a fellow at work left to go work for someone else. The stuff on his computer was backed up, but backup tapes are notoriously poor, so it was decided to keep his computer around and not have it immediately wiped and re-used elsewhere.

But to prevent someone overzealous with re-use mucking things up, Gene, who would need the data most, decided to put a BIOS password on. This is defeatable, but it means popping the case and therefore might get someone to think that maybe there's a reason that that password is there. On this system, two passwords were possible and he wanted to use them both.

I was asked, since I was in the room (the fellow who left and I had shared the room), what passwords might be good. I jokingly suggested "goaway" ala Slappy Squirrel for the first, and then "byebye" for the second. To my surprise, Gene used these suggestions.

All was fine for a few weeks. Every once in a while Gene would boot the computer and check something or copy something off. But eventually someone else had to check on something. Brian came in and tried to boot it and ran into the password screen. By then, I think I'd forgotten the passwords since I'd didn't need to use that computer and so didn't use the passwords regularly. I told Brian that Gene knew what the passwords were.

Brian phones Genes and asks about the passwords. Gene tells him. And Brian wonders why he was so rude. Gene had related the passwords without any explanation and Brian heard, "Go away. Bye Bye." A short walk to meet face to face cleared things up. Gene later accused me of setting him up. It wasn't a setup, at least not intentionally. I just suggested those passwords because it amused me at the time. I hadn't expected the results they eventually got.

Comments

[malterre.livejournal.com]

Verrah nice :)

[jdm314.livejournal.com]

Heh, my favorite password story:

Back in my freshman year in college, I was living with a roommate for the first time in my life, and to make matters worse, this particular roommate was from Nepal, so in addition to the social difficulty of adjusting to living in a small dormroom with somebody else, there was constant culture-clash as well. One day I received a very personal email, and after reading it got up to go to the bathroom. While I was away my roommate read the email. I was thoroughly pissed off about this, so I set up my screen-saver with a password, and a hotspot so I could engage it whenever I wanted. The password? "Roommate from hell" Easy to remember, hard to guess!

The next year I had my appletalk password set to "Salve!" until I caught somebody hacking in, apparently having guessed it. To this day I don't know if they had just picked random keystrokes until they got it, or if they happened to know I was into Latin.

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

Swordfish

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Pratchett takes a swipe at that one in one of the Night Watch series of the Discworld books.

Like Passwords For Chocolate

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Heh, a lot of the commenters on that article page had the same thought I had: How many of those people are just making up fake passwords for chocolate bars?

As for the problem of having to remember a lot of passwords, I say, write 'em down. It's much easier to guard a piece of paper than to remember 40 different passwords.

Re: Like Passwords For Chocolate

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That'd work if the paper the passwords were written on wasn't a Post-It note stuck a monitor.