April 19, 2001, 4:47 PM —
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2001
Pilot fish subscribes to an online business newsletter and receives a computer-generated password. She objects to it and tries to change it. No can do. She tries to get the system to generate a different password. No luck. And without using the password, she can't read the newsletter.
So she sends an e-mail to complain and request a new password.
The publisher writes back to apologize profusely and explain: "We automatically generate passwords by combining a random word from an electronic dictionary and a single digit. Most users get nice, innocuous passwords such as beetle3, crepuscular7 and so on. Yours didn't turn out so well.
"Our hope was that we could make the passwords both halfway memorable by using words and not strings like 's5dlew902' and difficult to guess at, by selecting random words for each user from a 115,000 word dictionary.
"At the time, we didn't even consider such things as profanity and inappropriate terms. We are reminded now that language is full of such pitfalls."
An understatement, fish says. Her random-word-plus-digit: genitals8.
