How to Choose a Password - Computerphile

An excellent poem there at the start: "Some people watching will have good passwords, Some people will have thought about this before, Some people should have thought about this and haven't, And hopefully will, after we talk about this, a little bit more"

"Make a password with words people don't usually use." changes password to "Nickelbackisagoodband"

All this talk about passwords always reminds me of this scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the book at least, not sure if it made it into the movie): In the story, the students have to say a password to get into their dormitory. Because of heightened security, they change the password so often that one of the students with rather poor memory (Neville) ends up writing down the whole list of passwords on a piece of paper. That list ends up getting stolen, defeating the entire purpose of the heightened security.

"Computerphile - Making you uncomfortable towards your life choices since 20XX"

Dr Mike Pound is my favorite presenter on computerphile.

I´ve had multiple sites/servises tell me my password is too long, and even had one telling me I couldn´t use special characters. How am I supposed to have a safe password when you don´t let me damnit.

"Maybe delete your account out of shame" proceeds to face palm Straight savage

2 more of these vids, and we'll socially engineer his master password boys!

It's all fine and dandy until you have to use a website that either: a) forces you to use uppercase, numbers, symbols, runes, smoke signals... or b) limits you password to something like 12-16 characters

"Pick a word that other people don't use very often, like your favorite band name." lol

Guys, post your passwords, lets see who's is best!

as a person that speaks 4 languages I changed my password to 4 words in 4 languages

I'd be interested to hear Mike talk about workplace password resets. Lots of places I've worked require employees to reset their passwords every month, and some have onerous requirements for length and symbol usage. I think that rather than improving security, it encourages people to make passwords easy to guess (since they expect to forget), or worse, actually write their passwords down and stick them to the computer.

it would be something if your 128 character uber password gets a hash collision with the password "password"

"Oops! Your password is too long!" "Oops! You need to include a number, a symbol, and an upper and lowercase letter" "Oops, that character is not supported!"

4 years ago, watching this video made me realize I had a bad password system and I switched to using a password manager. Thanks computerphile

How about using more than one language in the password? For example, horsecaballocapallceffyl is just horse in English, Spanish, Irish and Welsh - unless the hacker tries dictionary attacking you with multiple languages at once (which would surely increase the search space to the point of absurdity), that should be safe, still only requires you to remember four words, and most people know at least some words from a foreign language.

now they're gonna use the least likely 10,000 words in the dictionary great going mike

I always make my passwords 'incorrect'. So whenever i forget my password it will say 'your password is incorrect'

More tips: - Mix different languages - Use phonetic spelling instead of the dictionary version