you can't tell who really did something!

a-yup. which helps some people out tremendously.

t has spik-el-oost flashbacks

has spik-el-oost flashbacks

I wore that t-shirt the other day! It made me giggle.

I won't even get into how insecure that type of user name system is. All some needs to do is get a company directory and they have everyone's username.

Is it really practical to exercise security measures when it comes to usernames? I've never worked on a system where they weren't predictable. After all, you often have to look at a user ID and work out whose it is.

My magic secure password trick is to pick a word I'll remember and stick punctuation in the middle of it "carabiner" becomes "cara%biner" and if they need numbers it can be "cara1%biner" and we're good to go. If I have to change them regularly, just increment the number.

I know a lot of people here have a baseword and then a string of numbers.

yeah, I did that for a while. I would put a number before or after, which fooled the computer into thinking that it was a new password. You couldn't just use buffy1, then buffy2; it didn't like that. You'd have to use buffy1, then 2buffy, then buffy3. then it got better at recognizing that issue. now, I just get random. I also sometimes just use the same password in different languages. Yay babel fish.

I did have a spikelust moment once when I realized that I was going to have to give my password to someone and at the time it was something like mcshep4evah!

ita is my password twin! I pick a word and stick !5 in the middle. Like my niece's name "First!5Middle" or any other word. So all I have to do is remember the word.

I have a "universal" work password, plus 4 other passwords, 2 of which change not in sync with one another. Plus my personal stuff, of course. It is to argh.

Also, drilling cement and pounding on metal pipes directly under my chair. And just got spam with the subject line "Banana God Room." Hmmm

Is it really practical to exercise security measures when it comes to usernames? I've never worked on a system where they weren't predictable. After all, you often have to look at a user ID and work out whose it is.

It's more the issue of having it that uniform. Even having the options of firstinitial.lastname, lastname.firstinitial, lastnamefirstname, firstnamelastname, etc. all available increase the number of options that an attack has to work through since the username is not a given. Basically an attack now has to try all password options against multiple username options as opposed to just iterating through possible passwords.

I've never worked on a system where they weren't predictable.

In our district, depending on when you were hired, your user id might be totally transparent (first name.last name) or it might be opaque (initials followed by the last four digits of your employee number, which is a number given to you that the correlates to nothing else in your life). It was done like that not for security (I'm quite sure) but for convenience.