Password census
Dan Thanh Dang of
The Baltimore Sun
has written
an article about the proliferation of passwords
with this quote:
"Without my little crib sheet, I can't remember all that stuff," said [Dave] Murphy, of Ellicott City, who counts 279 different codes for the voice mail, computer and security systems, e-mail and Web sites in his life. "Who can memorize all that?"
In the digital age, people are on the verge of "password rage," frustrated with the abundance of codes they are required to memorize to secure their various networked devices. And the pressure to update the numerical and alphabetical soup keeps growing as threats of intrusions, cyberterrorism and identity theft increase.
I wrote on this topic
previously here.
I took a tally of the passwords and passphrases in my Treo stored using
PDA Keyring
and came up with this list
- Bank: 14
- Computers: 24
- Product keys: 6
- Phone: 6
- PIN: 8
- Web: 131
- Unfiled (on deck): 4
- Total: 193
Any guess I could come up with for how long it will
take for biometrics to replace all the passwords we need is apt to be wildly
wrong, since it depends on so many things. I'm not ready to give up yet
and resort to just
One Password to Rule Them All
though.