Passwords on the Internet
Scott Hanselman recently made a post about his experience with certain financial/budgeting software for home use. He encountered a problem while choosing a password, where he got a message: “Please enter a valid Password (Password should not contain any special characters, symbols or spaces)”. Shocking, eh?
These days when everything is open for hacking, why would you promote weak passwords? On the other hand you can get too careful. For a short while, my online banker (ABNAMRO) changed their web login interface where instead of typing in your username and password, I would have to click on a keyboard on the login page with my mouse to enter the credentials. This was the default setting with an option to turn off this method of entering data (with a confirmation box to top it up). This was super annoying. Thankfully, they have now made the keyboard entry default, and if someone chooses to, they can enable the ‘virtual’ keyboard to enter their username and password in a more secure way. I guess, I would use that setting if I was ever accessing my bank site from a public computer (which has possibilities of keyloggers being installed), but from my own laptop, I would never use it.
One is always balancing security with convenience and practicality. If I had it my way, I would never be locking my house (or my workstation for that matter).
[tag]Internet[/tag], [tag]Security[/tag]
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July 5th, 2007 at 11:46 am
You know, it seems to me that most of this security crap is a kind of microsoft conspiricy. When I took some computer courses a few years ago, we studied other OS’s like Unix and Lynux. Security issues were a lot easier to resolve in thesee systems.
There is no real reason for all these passwords, not in the true sense. Each computer has an individual IP address, and software could be designed to allow only “recognized” IP addys. That wouldn’t make any $en$e to Microbucks though.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
George,
I kind of disagree. With so many individual IP addresses that may need to access a software, it would be non-practical to do an IP-based restriction.
And in any case, what happens if one of the allowed IP gets compromised (as they routinely do).
Security is a problem, and it is definitely here to stay.