{"id":1506,"date":"2011-08-18T15:41:48","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T19:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1506"},"modified":"2011-08-18T15:41:48","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T19:41:48","slug":"passwords-and-reviewing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/18\/passwords-and-reviewing\/","title":{"rendered":"Passwords and Reviewing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was asked to review a proposal today.\u00a0 Right now, I am feeling a little overwhelmed:\u00a0 I have a new administrative position (&#8220;Senior Associate Dean, Education&#8221;) which involves, among 1000 other things, using a 25 year old computer program (ahh, ms-dos days!), I have some sports schedules that have to get out, I have a pile of referee reports, I am getting behind on some editorial duties, and I still have aspirations of publishing something myself once in a while.\u00a0\u00a0 But I try to be helpful in the review process:\u00a0 I recognize how important these are for people&#8217;s careers.\u00a0 This was the proposal too far, however:\u00a0 the title did not seem particularly relevant, and contained words that I am naturally suspicious of.\u00a0 But it couldn&#8217;t hurt to check it out and see if I might have some unique insight that might be useful.<\/p>\n<p>I go to the funding agency&#8217;s website, and find that I have to create an account to view the proposal.\u00a0 No problem:\u00a0 account creation is one of my skills.\u00a0 But I was stymied by the password requirement:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The password must follow these rules:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Must be at least 10 characters long<\/li>\n<li>Must contain at least two capital letters<\/li>\n<li>Must contain at least two lowercase letters<\/li>\n<li>Must contain at least two numbers<\/li>\n<li>Must contain at least two special characters: ~!@#$%^&amp;*()_-+={[}]|:;&gt;,&lt;.?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Ummmm&#8230;.. let&#8217;s see.\u00a0 I certainly can type in some nonsense that I can&#8217;t possibly remember, hoping that the reset simply goes to my email account (which has a pretty good password, but not one that meets those requirements).\u00a0 Or I can &#8230; &#8220;Thanks, but my schedule precludes my taking on more at this time.&#8221;\u00a0 Really&#8230; my reviewing of a funding proposal requires this amount of nonsense in a password?<\/p>\n<p>xkcd, as it often does, got it right (I believe the 2^44 comes from choosing 4 of the 2000 or so most common words):<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/936\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"xkcd on passwords\" src=\"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/password_strength.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"444\" height=\"361\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was asked to review a proposal today.\u00a0 Right now, I am feeling a little overwhelmed:\u00a0 I have a new administrative position (&#8220;Senior Associate Dean, Education&#8221;) which involves, among 1000 other things, using a 25 year old computer program (ahh, ms-dos days!), I have some sports schedules that have to get out, I have a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/18\/passwords-and-reviewing\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Passwords and Reviewing&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funding"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}