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N.A.N.Y. 2010 / Re: NANY 2010 Program Idea Suggestion Thread
« on: December 19, 2009, 04:23 PM »I have a suggestion for a program for the NANYevent. It is for a password program.
I know there are numerous programs that deal with passwords but the ones I’ve seen lack something although I’m not sure how to describe this lack,
From my perspective, we are strung up between two conflicting approaches to passwords.
The first approach produces highly secure passwords that we don’t “own” any more; we aren’t connected to them, we don’t feel that they are ours, can’t remember them, and have no control over them. They are as random as can be made and very secure; but because they are distant from us we avoid them, use them reluctantly if at all.
The second approach is to use a password that we recognize, that makes sense to us uses our name with some numbers or punctuation fore and aft.. These passwords we feel connected to, give us probably an inappropriate sense of security and are less good that they might be.
Here is a different orientation to password generation.
Can someone come up with a program that would that gave us some sense of connection to the password and some sense of control over its generation. Perhaps pieces of our name and a piece of the site name would be a good start, perhaps a key of some sort that used another familiar name to generate substitutions, or re arrangements.
My feelings about passwords and security are locked up in a childhood memories of decoder rings. What would be wonderful would be to have a program that printed out some sort of device that we could construct with paper and paper clips, maybe a version of something like a circular slide rule like device, something that would let us actually reproduce our password and vary it. Maybe little sliding slices of paper, something clever and useful that made the process of generating passwords fun again.
strayte