Where experts tread, lizard oil salesmen are certain to follow.
Security experts tell us that to forestall criminals from guessing a mechanism passwords, we should use strings of letters that can’t be found in a dictionary—and we should afterwards make a passwords even stronger by including numbers, symbols, and capitalization. The experts also suggest changing even a best passwords each few months. As a adage predicts, certain enough, someone is now hawking a new product it says will keep your passwords protected. If you’re lucky, it won’t leave we worse off than before we use it.
I became wakeful of a lizard oil in question, a Internet Password Minder, while examination TV late one insomnia-plagued night. A blurb touted a wonders.
“Who can remember all those wily combinations?” a announcer asked. “So we hang them on your monitor.” At this point, a blurb cuts to an picture of someone who has slapped his hard-won clever passwords—and usernames!—on Post-It Notes stranded to a corner of his mechanism monitor. “Not anymore!” a announcer pronounced excitedly.
Next came a requisite commemorative from a “Satisfied Customer”: With Password Minder, “I don’t have to worry anymore about confidence or temperament theft. we now have all my passwords in one place. It’s great!”
Then came a interesting product shot and an in-depth reason of how it works. It’s a… cover that has entries (hundreds of them, as a announcer points out) with blanks that we can fill in with a name of a website, your username, and password. And get this: it organizes them alphabetically for easy reference.
Worried about security? Here’s a announcer again to diffuse those concerns. The Password Minder is “bound in watchful leatherette.” WHEW! After all, who would gawk on a pellet of a excellent manmade element covering this unstable information safe and not be fooled into thinking, “That couldn’t presumably be a ring containing a keys to someone’s possess personal digital kingdom. No need to demeanour in there.” And meddling eyes competence not see it anyway, since as another video shave showed, a Password Minder can be put into a drawer and a drawer can be closed. And when we contend closed, we meant shut. You’d have to indeed open a drawer to see a book.
It’s tough to suppose anyone facing such a foolproof product, though only in case, a marketers of this product resolved a representation by sweetening a deal: “Call right now,” a announcer urged, “and we can double a offer.” That’s right: dual Password Minder notebooks for only $10.
Article source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/as-seen-on-tv-a-socalled-computer-security-product
