Comment by tshaddox

9 days ago

I bet the rationale would be "anything over 12 characters will be too hard to remember and people will just write down the password."

Until the late 2010s, the AD account password at my financial institution employer was capped at 12 characters because, for a subset of workers, AD creds were sync'ed to a mainframe application that could only support that many characters.

  • Sounds about right. One of Australia's big four banks had the online banking password requirement of exactly six characters for a long time - for similar reasons I assume.

I think we (whoever we is) should start normalizing the concept of passphrases; on sign-up screens they should show the benefits of a passphrase. I'm surprised that Googles PW generator does not use passphrases, and I don't know about ios because I haven't tried theirs yet.

I started using passphrases after I saw this xkcd https://xkcd.com/936/

When I'm trying to log into something on a device that has a terrible keyboard, like a TV or giant touchscreen, it's a lot easier to type words I know than gibberish.