Creating password protected accounts is part-and-parcel for operating on the web these days, but no two sites approach password creation in the same way. One site might allow you nearly unlimited freedom in the characters you choose and the length of your password, but another may limit you to as few as eight characters with no special characters allowed. Needless to say the ‘creation process’ can be frustrating much less managing the ever growing number of passwords we need on hand to access all our accounts. With this in mind Casey Johnston from Ars Technica decided to ask some companies about their password policies and received some interesting responses…
Keyboard photo courtesy of kewl (Tristan Schmurr). [Flickr]
From the blog post: “Most sites seem to have their own particular password bugaboos, but it’s rarely, if ever, clear why we can’t create passwords as long or short or as varied or simple as we want. (Well, the argument against short and simple is concrete, but the others are not immediately clear). Regardless of the password generation scheme, there can be a problem with it: a multi-word passphrase is too long and has no symbols; a gibberish password is too short, and what’s the % doing in there?”
Have you run across websites that made it difficult to create a strong and secure password (i.e. small number of characters, no special symbols, etc.)? Is your password collection secure and in good condition? Do you use any special software such as LastPass or other methods to manage your passwords? Make sure to share your thoughts and experiences with your fellow readers in the comments!
You can read through the results of Casey’s research at the article linked below.
Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters [Ars Technica]
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!
Oracle is due to release an update to patch critical vulnerabilities that malware authors have been exploiting in current (and older) versions of Java later today. Anyone who needs or actively uses the Java Runtime Environment for work or gaming should watch for the update to go live and promptly
By default, when you paste text copied from elsewhere into Word 2013, you automatically get all the formatting with it. This formatting most likely does not match the rest of the content of your document and may not come in neatly.
When every single file you have is stored directly on your computer, it’s easy to find what you need. There are great search tools like Everything from VoidTools that rip through your master file table in a fraction of a second to find exactly what you’re searching for.
In recent years it has become common for Microsoft to release trial or preview versions of its big-name products. This has been the case with Windows 8 as well as Office 2013 giving consumer the chance to try before they buy. If you downloaded the trial version of the suite, you can gain some extra
Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!
A watermark is a faded, background image that displays behind the text in a document. It can be used to indicate a document’s status (confidential, draft, etc.) or to add a company logo. We’ll show you how to add watermarks to documents in Word 2013.
The XPS format is Microsoft’s alternative to PDF. It was introduced in Windows Vista, but never gained much traction. However, modern versions of Windows continue to include better support for XPS files than PDF files.
Taking photos with your Android phone is great, but there comes a time when you need to get those photos onto your computer. A little while back we took a look at SnapPea, a handy tool for managing phones and tablets from Windows; SnapPea Photos is a Chrome extension designed specifically with photo
