¶ Security Garbage
In my office on campus, which I share with a handful of other English lit PhD students, we have a single computer. We used to have an old Mac G3 that used a little old 15” monitor that just stayed on all the time. It wasn’t very fast, but it was easy to sit down, check your email or look up some fact on Wikipedia and sit back down at your desk.
Last summer, they upgraded that Mac to a Dell machine. This was originally purchased by the university in 2002 (so says the sticker on the side): it is a P4 with 256 MB of RAM. It is painfully slow and, as if they were deliberate in their contempt, I think the previous owner spilled something on the keyboard since all the keys stick a little bit.
Now we run Windows XP and log into the Humanities network; each one of us has an individual log in and desktop, etc. Now from the time I sit down until I can open up a browser (or a word processing) window, it might take some two or three minutes. On the older, slower mac, I could be finished by the time this machine is ready to get started. So much for an upgrade.
But that’s not the worst part. Every term, the Humanities network requires we change our password, otherwise we can’t log in. Today, it insisted that I procrastinate no longer and choose a new password. You never know when some malicious hacker might steal my info and be able to, you know, open up Firefox and browse the web. There is no personal or secure information of mine on this computer.
I tried to use one of the simple passwords I recycle for just this purpose. The computer told me that I couldn’t use that password because it didn’t pass muster. In fact, it didn’t pass muster in a number of ways. My new password, it told me, must conform to the following criteria:
- It must not be the same as my username
- It must not be the same as my full name
- It must be at least 7 characters long
- It must meet three of the following characteristics: lowercase letters, upper-case letters, numbers, alphanumeric symbols like #, $, or !
- It may not have been changed in the past 24 hours
- It may not repeat any of my previous 24 passwords
This was written in an alert dialog in a single, tightly-spaced paragraph. I must have stared at the screen for five minutes, trying to come up with something memorable that met all of those stupid criteria. I should probably write it down, because I’m not sure I remember even now what I came up with. No repeats for 24 revisions? Is this a nuclear facility? Just to check my email?
It might not be so bad if this computer didn’t make me wait so dang long to do anything. And if, you know, they didn’t foist the garbage from the engineering department as if we didn’t know better/care. If I deserve garbage hardware, can’t I at least choose a garbage password?
23 June 2008