Courtesy of goople.com
Know what 123456 is? It’s the world’s most popular security password. (“To Fix Your Terrible Passwords, Kill them,” by Nate Lanxon, Bloomberg Businessweek, May 29-June 4, 2017, pgs. 36-37.) Understand, I mock no one for lack of originality. For a time, 000000 worked for me. Then my bank nixed my choice, assumed I couldn’t be trusted with my financial information, and demanded a new code with a mix of 8 numbers and letters. Security has grown so tight, even Netflix demanded a new security code. All this password hoopla accounts for the explosion in the size of my 3 ring security binder. It’s grown so large, yesterday, I mistook if for my copy of the English Oxford Dictionary.
What I really need is a file to find the files in my code file. Happily, writer Nate Lanxon assures me help is on the way. Yahoo, he explains, already allows smart phone users to unlock their devices with a “push notification” instead of a password. Good news, except I don’t own a smart phone. I need help with my clunky personal computer.
Lanxon isn’t flustered. He assures me, tech companies are experimenting with iris scanners to replace passwords. Immediately, I think of those horror films where the villain gouges out the billionaire’s eye to gain access to the man’s gold bullion vault. A treasure hunt through my code book seems preferable.
Apple and Microsoft offer fingerprint identification on some of their devices. I guess losing a finger is better than losing an eye. But not by much. One company tried working with total facial recognition. Unfortunately, some wily thief took a picture of his victim and the scanner smiled back.
Given the options, I’ll stick to my book of passwords. The tech world has yet to catch up with Egypt’s ancient invention: paper.
