One Day, and I'm already tired

[omorka]

I went in on Tuesday to pick up my keys. While I was there, I logged on to my computer (normal behavior, right?). It demanded that I change my password, so I did.

When I logged on this morning, it demanded that I change my password again - and refused to take any password I gave it. After giving up in frustration, I found out (in the INCREDIBLY LONG faculty meeting this morning) that MIS has now demanded that our passwords must be "strong," which essentially means t#3Y mU&t B3e w%!Tt34 in !e3T (at least one of each of the following: capital letter, lowercase letter, number, non-alphanumeric symbol). Oh, and 8 characters long (previously they had to be 6-8). Of course having tried and failed to change my password more than five times, the system marked me as a password cracker and I had to call one part of MIS to get them to fix it. I used the character ! in my password; when I read it over the phone to the MIS guy, I pronounced it "bang" and he got terribly confused. :(

I failed my "remember old password" roll on the WebBook (our online gradebook) and so I e-mailed our tech specialists to reset my password. They said they couldn't, that I would have to phone MIS (a different section this time). The first time I tried, I got transferred to someone who wasn't at his desk, and dumped into his voice mail. (He never returned my message.) The second through fifth times, no one answered at all. I finally went up to the tech specialists to gripe, and they managed to reset me so I wasn't blocked; I figured out my password on try #5. Meanwhile, they discovered that several things which were supposed to have been loaded into the WebBook had not been, so I guess it was a good thing I went up there. They're not happy with MIS now, though. (Not that they were thrilled before.)

It's total Bananaville down in the counselor's office. I suspect I'll eventually have to go search for the envelope from AP myself. AP scores are maybe #647 on their list of things to do before school starts, and they're currently working on #12 or so.

I went to RR and essentially demanded that the math Pre-AP/AP teachers be considered an instructional team, like any other instructional team. She said she thought it was a spiffy idea and would get Ms. HR to put her seal of approval on it. If it comes from them as a fait accompli now, as opposed to from me later in the year, I think the other members of the team will accept it, even if the idea of another meeting makes them gag. One improvement down, N-1 to go . . .

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

My usual procedure for such passwords is to take a normal password of mine and put the random character sequence at the end. I don't know why they're being so strict with you; any eight character password that has any of mixed case/alpha+numeric/nonalphanumeric should be secure enough. The concern is usually people whose password is "hi", or something ridiculous like that.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Previously, I'd been following the mixed-case and numeric rules, but I hadn't ever used nonalphaumeric characters regularly.

Part of the problem was that someone had used their child's date of birth as their password, which of course had been easily cracked by a student. But it seems to me that the correct response to that is a reminder to not use things that are obviously linked to you as passwords, not to insist that we write in l33t.

I was particularly disappointed that the MIS guy didn't know what a bang was.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

Hmm...under the new rules they can *still* use their childs date of birth, e.g. April 22, 1987(mixed case, numbers, and a comma).

MIS is more business than CS. I'm not surprised they don't know "bang", which I haven't seen commonly used much. Then again, I haven't really looked -- I've become less and less enamored of CS culture as time goes on.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Hmm . . . perhaps it's a Rice thing - everyone who used a networked computer anywhere on campus learned to call it a bang

Not just Rice

[wyldraven.livejournal.com]

I have called "!" a bang and "*" a splat since my early days of computing (back in the 80's). And I never attended Rice.

Oldschool

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

'Bang' is perhaps too oldschool for 'em, but it might also be that it is usually a reserved char, and seldom seem in passwords and filenames. Could be the context?

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

Bang means '!'? That's good to know. I couldn't find the etymology in print, but there are plenty of on-line references. I wonder if it was originally typesetters jargon, or if it originated with computer-users.


http://developer.syndetic.org/query_jargon.pl?term=foo

bang:
1. n. Common spoken name for ! (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a bang path in spoken hackish. In elder days this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring excl or shriek; but the spread of Unix has carried ?bang? with it (esp. via the term bang path) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for !. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written !; one would not say “Congratulations bang” (except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the exact characters “foo!” one would speak “Eff oh oh bang”. See shriek, ASCII. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly “I have achieved enlightenment!”, or “The dynamite has cleared out my brain!” Often used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a thinko immediately after one has been called on it.

Jargon

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

I definitely have seen it called that in late 60s and early 70s art, zine, and other West coast counterculture stuff, but there's a lot of crossover between them and the West coast computer geeks. I've also heard advertising people use it to indicate punching up flimsy verbage. I guess they see it as the literary equivelent of putting flame decals on your old car to make it faster.