New password policy

[pwl_b]

Hi,

I have just been forced to change my password to this site and I would like to ask about the new password policy. Why is there a requirement to include unmemorable characters (like &^@ etc.) and numbers instead of setting the password length to a large enough minimum of, say, 16 alphanumeric characters? And moreover, if you want to force people to increase their password strength why the upper limit of characters (15 if I recall correctly)? Isn't this a little inconsistent?. To illustrate my point: http://xkcd.com/936/

Best regards,

Paweł Biernat.

[James_T_Intel]

Hi Paweł, The change were actually implemented to provide consistency across all of our support mechanisms. In the past, some accounts required stronger passwords and others did not. If your account needed to be changed to one requiring a strong password, this required a support engineer to manually change your password. Regarding why this is our password policy, I do not have an acceptable answer to that question. This really isn't the appropriate place for asking that question, but I'll see if I can get an answer for you. Sincerely, James Tullos Technical Consulting Engineer Intel® Cluster Tools