Stop the password not strong enough madness

2010-09-20

There is an increasing number of websites that require you to have a strong password, this is very annoying. And the most important thing is that,

if my password is stronger it will not help me with anything, the only advantage of a harder password is that a brute force password guessing on that password will be harder and that should be impossible on a good website that has a decent captcha check after a few wrong passwords tries.

I use simple password that are easier to remember and I don't care about how strong they are. In some cases I don't care about someone breaking into that particular account, so the password is not relevant.

I know that security is important and I don't have human easy to guess passwords, but I don't understand why I should have computer hard to guess passwords on systems where this kind of problem should not exist.

I understand the risk that most of websites could store an md5 or other kind of hash of the password that in case of being stolen can be easier to crack with brute force, but that goes to far and websites should take measures to prevent this by adding salts, increase their security and other things but not by forcing me to try to make up a "harder" password and try even harder not to forget it.

I think this becomes an important usability problem that will chase away their potential users by requesting them harder things to do without any real return value.

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