Every time you sign up for a new website, email address, or social media account, you’re reminded of one of the most curious aspects of modern life for an Internet user: the increasing complexity of passwords.
Whether you’re being graded on the relative strength (or weakness) of your password based on its length or being required to include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, or other symbols along the way, passwords are getting more and more complicated in the name of Internet safety.
This modern form of cryptography often leads to one of three results:
- you use the same password over and over for everything (not safe)
- you have to write down different passwords to every site in order to keep them all straight (also not safe)
- you opt for a password-management service to handle them for you (a bit unwieldy)
Well, as it turns out, an 11-year-old girl named Mira Modi might have the answers to all your password needs.
Mira started a company called DiceWARE to create passwords that are both secure and easy to remember!
From her website:
The DiceWARE method creates strong passwords that are easy to remember but extremely difficult for hackers to crack. Passwords contain random words from the dictionary, such as: alger klm curry blond puck horse.
For the very affordable price of $2, Mira will create a six-word password just for you, send it to you by mail, and then encourage you to customize it however you see fit — capitalized letters, number replacement, etc. — so even she won’t know your password when you’re done.
How does it work?
You roll a die 5 times and write down each number. Then you look up the resulting five-digit number in the DiceWARE dictionary, which contains a numbered list of short words.
So, essentially, the same randomness that can make Yahtzee a delight or a challenge will decide each of your six words. It’s ingeniously simple and designed to dissuade the usual hacking tricks.
Kudos to Mira for creating an affordable and immensely clever way to make our websurfing safer! This is puzzly thinking at its finest!
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