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Geezers Pick Stronger Passwords Than Young'uns

Posted by timothy on from the as-many-characters-as-the-post-it-will-hold dept.

McGruber writes "Joseph Bonneau, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, calculated the password strengths of nearly 70 million Yahoo! users. He compared the strengths of passwords chosen by different demographic groups and compared the results. People over the age of 55 pick passwords double the strength of those chosen by people under 25 years old." Does this mean that the younger users are more cavalier and naive, or are they simply more cynical about the actual value of strong passwords in the era of large-scale user-database compromises?

3 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. The older you are ... by jabberwock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... the more likely it is that you actually have an identity worth stealing.

  2. young != geek by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ....or are they simply more cynical about the actual value of strong passwords in the era of large-scale user-database compromises?

    I seriously doubt that most young people (i.e. the ones who aren't tech majors) even understand what this means. Young people appear to be more tech-savvy mostly because they have grown up around it and are not intimidated by it; it isn't because they have an innately better understanding of computer science and follow tech news more closely.

    In fact, that lack of intimidation is also a better explanation of why they choose weaker passwords: they don't take it as seriously as older people, who both have had more (bad) experiences in life to make them more cautious, and are less comfortable with computers out of unfamiliarity

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  3. Re:Use case differences... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Older users are more likely to have a Yahoo address as their primary email, etc.

    Real geezers telnet into the server and read their email using MH. If the command line was good enough in 1982, then it is good enough today.

    Joking aside, ssh and pine(*) work really well. If the content of the email is heavily using some sort of markup language and graphics it is probably not an email I need or want. On some days I think ssh/pine would be more efficient than a modern GUI-based client.

    For those unfamiliar with text email clients think of them as twitter without a 140 character limit. ;-)

    (*) Substitue alpine, mutt, whatever if you prefer.