James Werrell: Can we take a pass on passwords?

Remember HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? HAL turned out to be a homicidal maniac because of errors in his programming, and he managed to kill all but one of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft he was controlling.

But I might put up with those tendencies if, like HAL, my laptop and i-Phone could recognize me and turn themselves on and off whenever I needed them. That’s how much I hate passwords.

If we had to remember just one password for everything, that might be tolerable. And, I might add, some people do use the same password for almost everything.

But the tech geniuses tell us that is wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! It is an open invitation to a hacker to get into our computers and phones, and steal the contents of our Facebook accounts or the thousands of spam messages we haven’t deleted yet from our emails.

The only way to be completely secure, we are told, is to devise passwords that are so nonsensical no one could ever figure them out. Which, of course, makes them impossible to remember at all unless you, yourself, are a computer like HAL.

Maybe even a demanding password system like that would be practical if we had to remember only one or two impossible-to-remember passwords, the ones with multiple random letters, some capitalized, some not, with meaningless numbers at the end. But we don’t just use passwords to open up our computers and phones; we have to use passwords for every function on the computer and every transaction we make via computer.

We create an account with a special password to gain entry to the online shoe store to buy a pair of shoes. Then, eight months later, we try to use the account again to buy another pair of shoes.

After trying all the obvious variations of passwords we use for other stuff, we reluctantly admit we can’t remember the one we used last time. “Have you forgotten your password?” the computer queries.

Well of course I have! What did you expect? So, go ahead and kill me. (You don’t want to say that to HAL.)

I am not alone in hating passwords. Researchers have compiled a list of the 25 worst passwords of 2014, stupidly simple passwords that people use all the time because they are easy to remember.

No. 1? It’s “123456,” which also was No. 1 in 2013.

No. 2? It’s “password,” which also was No. 2 in 2013.

“Baseball,” “dragon” and “football” are new to the list. “Monkey” was up five to No. 12, and one that I mistakenly thought was sort of clever, “letmein,” was up one to No. 13.

Fortunately, none of the names of my dead pets or my birthday made the top 25.

We long ago surpassed the technology portrayed on the old “Star Trek” shows, where the transponders used by the crew of the Starship Enterprise looked like 1990s-style flip phones. In other words, we have exceeded in real life the imaginations of science fiction writers trying to envision our future.

So why haven’t we come up with a real-life version of the electronic devices in movies that can read our retinas or our fingerprints? How about the ability to open a vast collection of data with a simple swipe of an electronic key? When was the last time you watched a movie about the future where the characters had to remember passwords?

“Let’s see, my favorite cat was named Voltron and my birthday is 2075. No, drat! That’s the password to the centrifuge on my tritium air bike.”

Of course, being able to gain access to our computers with retinas or fingerprints might tempt hackers to pluck out our eyeballs or cut off our fingers. But that’s another movie.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to simply use the word “access,” ha-ha, as my password for everything. No one will ever think of that!

Darn, it’s No. 17.

This story was originally published March 26, 2015 at 6:45 PM with the headline "James Werrell: Can we take a pass on passwords?."