A
fter eight unsuccessful attempts,
Stefan Thomas, a German-born
programmer in Silicon Valley, has two
more goes at guessing his password
before his hard drive self-combusts.
The hard drive contains 7,002 bitcoins,
whatever they are. When they were first mined ten
years ago, however that was done, they were worth just
a dollar each. Now they’re worth nearly £200 million.
Some people have recommended hypnosis to help
him remember. Others think he should clone the drive,
whatever that means. Meanwhile Stefan claims he is
remaining sanguine, which is a lie. If I can shed tears of
frustration because it took me a whole morning,
grandmaster levels of concentration and a long
conversation with my mother about the colour of my
first car just to check my frequent flyer miles (why?),
then Stefan has definitely spent most of the past ten
years pacing around his house like Jack Torrance in
The Shining. Imagine if Jack Torrance in The Shining
had to remember the password for his typewriter
each morning. It would have been a much shorter,
much bloodier film.
In 1983, when life was simple, Isaac Asimov
predicted that by 2019 robots would be doing all
our admin and many of us would be leading a “life rich
in leisure”. Well, we’re about 38 months into 2021 and
the main thing technology has brought me is a life rich
in not being able to access things online. There is not
£200 million at stake, but there is something almost as
unattainable — the smooth running of my day.
The reason “123456” is the most common password
and “password” is the fourth most common password is
that it’s not humanly possible to remember the sort of
fiendish jumble of letters that would defeat a Russian
hacker. Maybe I could manage it for one online account,
but, as we are constantly reminded, you should not use
the same password for different sites. If you do, theemperor of Kenya’s second cousin will steal all your cash.
A few years ago the password police started taking
action against people who used “password” as their
password. They insisted on a combination of letters
and numbers. Then special symbols too. Then at least
three quarters of the Rosetta Stone. The password is
my password people responded by picking a main word
as the foundation of their new password. This word was
the town in which they lived with a sexy girlfriend of
whom their wife does not wish to be reminded. From
there, all manner of unmanageable variations would
proliferate. Bristol1. Bristol2 ... Bristol96. Bristol137$!.
“What’s the password for PayPal, darling husband?”
“Try Bristol, then a heart emoji, then 69, then an
exclamation mark, darling wife.”
Silence for three days.
At some point the people who were supposed to be
designing robots to do all our admin worked out that
computers can hack any password faster than we can
think it up. That’s when we should have shut down the
internet. But instead we had to start proving we were
human with a knock-off Turing test. Congratulations
on remembering the nickname you gave your third
boyfriend’s ... pet chameleon. Now tell us which of
these nine photographs contain people eating ice
cream. Hint: some of the people facing away from
the camera are also eating ice cream.
Inevitably computers became more adept at
spotting ice creams. That’s when we should have
nuked Silicon Valley. Instead we got two-step
verification. There are, of course, two types of
two-step verification. The one where you have to find
your phone because the robots have sent you a text
with a six-digit number in it. And the newer one where
you have to download an app that generates a new
alphanumeric code every seven milliseconds. While
you’re trying to type A74TX0 in less than seven
milliseconds, the robots are leading a life rich in leisure.
The point where a man is going to lose a Croesian
amount of imaginary money mined from the baffling
crypto-ether because he can’t remember the town in
which a girlfriend went to secondary school is exactly
a decade past the point where we all should have
realised Asimov was way off. Robots won’t make our
lives easier. Not, at least, until we tell them our
passwords and they take over completely n
CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE @mattrudd
MATT RUDD
It’s not humanly possible
to remember the jumble
of letters that would
defeat a Russian hacker
Help! I’m trapped in a vortex
of forgotten passwords
Technology was meant to liberate us. And perhaps it might, if only I could log on
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5