Dumb security...

Hi! Am I in a bad mood today? Well, maybe, but I really feel upset when something supposed to help me to be safer on the net starts to get into my way or, even worse, pushes me in the other direction. That is what happened today when I tried to use a well know credit card website (which I'll not name here :) to see my billing information. Of course, as I don't use this service very often, I didn't remember my user name / password! Ok, (I thought) I just need to call their support service and ask them to reset my user name / password to one that I do know. So, I picked up the phone and called them. My first issue was that they didn't allowed me to choose my user name! Ack! Ok, this is not a big issue anyway (I can always write it down somewhere). The real problem (in my opinion) is that they requires that you MUST set a password which is at least 6 but no more than 8 characters in lenght! And you MUST use numbers also! Ok, I understand that mixing numbers, digits, punctuation, etc. in a password helps to make it stronger, but these rules forces me to give up on my "password schema" (I use different passwords for each site; each password is an encoding of a lengthy phrase). The result? I'd never be able to remember the password I choose (no matter which one I pick); it's even worse as probably I'd choose a weaker one in a desperate (hopeless) try to not forget it again. After this episode I decided to take the time (ok, I'm a little bit lazy) and give some password manager a try (at least they succeeded in the purpose of forcing users - at least me - to use a stronger password :). I'll be experimenting with a firefox plugin called iMacros. Let's see how it works :) See you. Adriano.