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Comment by bennyp101 | Hacker News Reader

How do you remember a complex password? By practice? On what device? I’m sure those involved have bigger things to worry about/remember than a complex password to email.

I don’t think that is the solution. I also don’t know what is.

Public services that somehow provide safe access to email etc?

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The same way I remember everything else: I think about it enough. There are plenty of good memorable password mnemonics out there, too. So that seems a non-issue.

In any case, I'm sure those involved would prefer the option of remembering a password to not having that option and getting locked out forever. Seems like a good solution. There may be better ones you can implement once this one is, always room for improvement you know

I always recommend a easy to remember sentence as a password.

with spaces, punctuation, some sort of capilatiozation scheme (cap every last letter, or every other ,etc) and throw a number in there.

lot easier to remember than 32 random bits.

purposely misspelling something, adding spaces, and your own cap scheme make it a secure password.

What works great for me is using _songs_ , ideally a sentence not directly from the chorus of a lesser-known song, complete with punctutation and some obvious replacement rules (such as `and` -> `&` ) . The reason why this works so great is that many people have some obscure song "in them" that they know by heart but which are not super widely known.

I only had to change one of my passwords once when my coworkers discovered I was reliably whistling "Stayin' alive" after logging in.

Complex doesn't mean hard to remember. XKCD936-style passwords (four words with no special chars) are nearly uncrackable and quite easy to remember. Something even simpler like [mother's name][father's name][year of birth] is also very strong when you aren't being targeted specifically (you almost certainly aren't, especially if you're homeless). The remaining issue is password reuse, but that's mostly solved by having two passwords - one for your email and one for everything else.

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