Journal #2 Revised- With Pa$$w0rds Comes Anxiety?

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            The TED Talk I chose for this assignment is titled “What’s Wrong with Your Pa$$w0rd?” by Lorrie Faith Cranor, a computer science and engineering professor at Carnegie Melon University.  Basically, this presentation is about the troubles people go through with having to choose and memorize such complicated passwords for so many different accounts.  This is clearly for security purposes so that hackers have less of a chance of getting into personal accounts.  Cranor shows her audience the research done at the university, including what the most effective and secure choice of password is that someone can use.  The best thing someone can do when creating a password, according to the statistics, is pick a longer word that is easily pronounceable, but not something used in a usual day to day conversation, or maybe not even a real word.  An example of this would be the word “tassawaki.”

            A presentation like this may not always seem extremely exciting, but it was actually quite interesting.  It showed just how easy it can be for someone to hack a password and get any information needed.  Lorrie started out by talking about how many requirements there usually are for creating a password.  Most websites and companies ask for 8 characters, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, and no more than 3 of any character.  This is something we can all relate to, especially as college students, because just having to create a password for our school emails requires most or all of those criteria.  In fact, we are made to change our password just about every semester.  Even the title of this presentation shows just how complicated a password can be.  I think the hardest thing for all of us is having to memorize so many different passwords because it seems like everything on the internet requires one now.  I’m sure that everyone can understand why passwords need to be so detailed, no matter how annoying, but until this TED Talk, I didn’t realize just how important it truly is to make them long or difficult, considering how extremely easy it is for a smart hacker to figure them out.