Password is Rejected and Nonsense is Accepted!

Is nonsense considered a password?

 It is quite surprising to me how meaningless things become part of our vocabulary.

We use them because everyone uses them and we lose the actual meaning that they convey.

Take, for instance, the word password.

Now that everything is done online, you can’t do anything without a password. My question is, are they passwords?

There is a craze for strong passwords where they insist on entering special characters, and numbers along with capitalized and small letters!

What they don’t understand is, that the more complicated the password is, the more it is difficult for us to remember.

The idea of using a password is for you to remember it.

You have a combination of characters and letters and numbers. And you are stuck with several passwords! You have to write it down somewhere.

You can’t write it in a diary or a notebook because you may need the password somewhere on the go. So, the easiest thing to do is to note it down somewhere on the smartphone. Some people may carry a piece of paper or a small notebook where the passwords are written.

Now, it is so easy for a robber to steal your phone as well as the note. You can’t say you don’t remember the password! Nobody expects you to, either. The robber is also aware of this.

Most importantly, you don’t need a password! If you have a phone where the corresponding app is installed, all you or the robber has to do is to click on “Forgot Password”. Immediately, you will get an OTP on the phone and everything is easier from then onwards.

Either you or the robber can set a new password, which once again you can’t remember!

So, time and again, you have to write it down somewhere and the show goes on.

I am more concerned about the usage of the word “Password”. A word is a combination of letters that becomes meaningful. However, when you use special characters, the idea of meaning is gone. No language has gone to the extent of including special characters in their vocabulary.

Nor is there any language using numbers as part of the word.

Nowadays, they use 2 and 4 to mean to and for, but it is just a symbolic representation of the actual word. You have to know the word and its meaning when substituted symbols are used.

Even the abbreviation OTP, which has come into existence in the modern technologically sound world, means “One Time Password”, where they don’t send any word but a combination of numbers. Receiving a package, boarding a cab, entering into your account, etc, everybody needs an OTP.

In the olden days, passwords had an appropriate meaning. It is the word you utter for some special consideration like entering an enclosure. Gradually, once the computers started using them extensively, a word became a set of nonsense syllables. The justification is, simple words or dates can be hacked.

But the hackers are anyway doing their job efficiently irrespective of what nonsense we are using.

It reminds me of using a lock. By locking our house, we can only stop a passer-by from entering our house when we are not there. But it can’t stop a professional robber or a locksmith. The more complicated you make the lock, the more ways these people devise methods to unlock it.

When you lose the key to your house, we have no other recourse but to summon a locksmith, without whom we can’t enter our own house.

Losing the key is equivalent to forgetting the password.

Some people even claim that “password” is an abbreviation. However, they invented the abbreviation later on but the password has been in use for a few thousand years.

The right usage is to use the word “Passcode”. It is at least more appropriate and meaningful. A passcode represents letters, numbers, and special characters that are used as part of the code to pass the security.

Some people may ask me as to why am I so bothered about it?

In experimental psychology laboratories, we use something called “nonsense syllables”. This contains a series of letters especially with a combination of consonants and vowels to make them sound like a word. Most experiments on memory and concentration use these regularly.

This is what made me think that now nonsense is substituted for a word. And the greater the nonsense, the stronger the “password”.

Let us not leave a wrong legacy to the younger generation. Centuries later, the citizens must not say that their ancestors were wrong and they are forced to carry somebody’s mistake.

We still use so many words that have wrong connotations but have been in use for a long time.

In an age of education and technology, let’s not make unnecessary mistakes.

To know about other Insights on other issues, Click Here

How can you use social media and maintain Social Distance?