Company gives me this little number-changy keycode thingy. You have to type it in to get access to the network. I’ve had them before. LCD numbers, 0-9. Easy.
Hey look, this time there are alpha characters. Certainly they’ll have been smart enough to stick with hexadecimal to limit confusion.
Oh look, there’s an L. Lovely.
Hmmm… with the squarish LCD numbers, that leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. Certainly they’ll have been smart enough to omit the numbers that are similar to letters.
Oh look. There’s a G, O, and E. Excellent.
Oh well, I might lock myself out of the access point, but on the bright side I may one day get a password that spells “BOOGERZ”
I have one but it only has numbers. It makes me feel like a spy or an alien. Every minute, I get beamed a new code that no one can crack. It has to be kept with me at all times because something…something…something civilization will end.
The one I have for the nuclear football only does numbers. At least I like to say it’s for the nuclear football; saying it’s for accessing register systems is just dull.
Honestly, I’m not sure. All I know is I’ve seen most of the letters from A-Z. So when 6 or 0 come up, I can’t be sure it isn’t asking for G or O. I guess I could always track down the dingdongs who manufactured it and ask them whether they were too stoned to write down which set of numbers and characters they used when they designed this piece of crap.
Mine is basically a Christmas ornament at this point, since try as I might, I can’t access my company’s network. I feel sort of important having it, though.
For the record, there is no “beaming” of new codes into your widget, there’s a number generating algorithm inside of it, and an identical one sitting on a server somewhere. Much cheaper that way.
You may be technically correct but I choose not to think of it that way. In my mind, there is a team monitoring me from a mountain bunker at all times. Every minute, there is a risk assessment and then a countdown. Five…four…three…two…one - BEAM CODE! It works well that way.
Oh dear Og… People still use SafeWord? One of the big selling points we had for going to SecurID enterprise-wide was that it only used digits 0-9, so there’s no confusion about letters.
That and the problems people brought on themselves by idly pressing the button again and again in meetings and getting the token out of synch with the system.