Remember the “old days?” When passwords were an afterthought. Compare that to now with double passwords, verifications, find the motorcycle, add up these numbers, and check that you are human. What happened in between?
There have always been passwords - it began with ancient military “watchwords” - remember Ali Baby and the Forty Thieves with Open Sesame. Which made us children laugh tremendously. Was it “Open sesame” or was it “Open says a me” - that’s the joke to us back then. Supposedly it was about the sesame plant’s seed pod bursting open suddenly and dramatically when ripe, mimicking the cave door opening. But passwords were for thieves and for the military, not for us.
And so that was the case. In the 1960s when there was time-sharing mainframes, and more than one person wanted to use the computer, that’s the start of passwords. From 1960 to 1962 is all it lasted and the first password theft occurred just two years after the first password started. The story goes that Alan Scheer, poor guy just trying to do the work on his PhD was given just four hours a week on the shared computer, definitely not enough. So he printed the system’s password file and logged in as other users to get the work done. He did share the password… oh oh. There aren’t any details about his career after this. Of course it did mean better methods of creating and storing passwords with adding random characters to a stored password. Another really big milestone was in 1988 when The Morris Worm infected 1 in 10 networked computers within 24 hours. It was a ‘harmless”experiment, so it goes, but it inspired the beginnings of the profession of hacking. Compared to Scheer, he got convicted and 3 years probation and 400 hours community service. He went on to be an MIT professor and well-known figure.
We are now in the land of breaches happening all the time, and fingerprints being used regularly for our entry to our computer and various systems.
And that password to get into Heaven? We can count on Forrest Gump for that one.
When Forrest Gump reaches the pearly gates, St. Peter asks him for his password. Forrest immediately says, "1Forrest1".
I was looking at my frosty pictures and wanted to make some infrared images which have a dreamy, frosty quality. But I don’t have a camera that’s been converted to infrared. Here’s what two samples look like, and then here’s my own version, done in Photoshop, following directions from an expert.
