Computer passwords - Speak, friend, and enter. The Economist

Mar 24th 2012 | from the print edition. PASSWORDS are ubiquitous in computer security. All too often, they are also ineffective. A good password has to be both easy to remember and hard to guess, but in practice people seem to plump for the former over the latter. Names of wives, husbands and children are popular. Some take simplicity to extremes: one former deputy editor of The Economist used “z” for many years. And when hackers stole 32m passwords from a social-gaming website called RockYou, it emerged that 1.1% of the site’s users—365,000 people—had opted either for “123456” or for “12345”...Read here...