So I'm a student here at the University of Texas at Austin, and we have a pretty spiffy computer network running here called UTDirect. Its pretty helpful for finding out information and taking care of business. You can register and add/drop classes, you can check your grades, you can figure out what books you need to buy for you classes. You can find out the email address for a professor and the web page, if any for a particular class. All in all its a pretty nifty class.
To get into this system you have to type in an EID, and electroic identification (read: user name) and your password. Pretty simple huh? I used to be one of those stupid people that had a pretty simple password. I used to use "pidge" as my password, boy, that'd be a simple one for someone to figure out. I finally wised up and changed it to something more difficult. I changed my password to the license plate number of the first car that I bought with the last two digits reversed. I was pretty pleased with that. How the hell would someone figure that out huh?
Well recently the ITS department instituted new rules for passwords here at the university, and I thought I'd pass those along to let everyone else know how stupid they were. These are the actual requirements for the new passwords:
1) UT EID password is case-sensitive
2) It must be between 8 and 20 characters long.
3) You may not re-use any of your last 10 passwords
4) It cannot contain blanks
5) It must consist of letters, numbers, and special characters. The special characters that are permitted are: ! @ # $ % & * ( ) . + = : ; " '
6) Your password cannot contain any words found in the dictonary or common proper nouns of four letters or longer. In addition, common letter transpoitions are not allowed (for example @ for a, ! for i, or zero fo O).
7) It cannot contain your UT EID
8) It cannot contain your first or last name
9) It cannot contain your birthday in any form
10) It cannot contain your Social Security number
Easy huh? I thought I was set, my old licence plate number had seven digits and the last digit was a 7, so me being the smart guy I am just added an & after the last digit of my licence plate. I did this and everything worked great, until I went into one of the computer labs to work on some homework. It would seem that this computer lab uses an additional log in program that has a problem with &'s. Now this wouldnt be a problem if it came back and told me that there was a problem with my password. So the first time it doesnt work. I figure I typed my password in wrong. The second time, I thought perhaps this log in system was different from UTDirect and that I had to use my old password to log on to the comptuer and then my new one to log onto UTDirect. Well that didnt work either. So I decided to ask one of the guys that worked at the computer lab. He asked me to try to log in so he could see what happened. It didn't work. He then asked me to try to log on to one of the Mac's. Well that didn't work either, and for those of you that haven't been keep count, that would be 5 incorrect log ons. My password was now locked. It turns out I would have to physically go into the Registrars office to get my password reset. WHEE, cause I got plenty of time for that. When I walk into the registrar's office, they reset my password easily enough, almost as if they have had plenty of practice doing it. They then gave me a sheet of paper that tells me how to go unlock my password so I can go and reset it. This sheet came from a stack of literally a thousand sitting on the desk.
Almost as if they thought they might need a few."