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Speak Friend and Enter – Do people use movie passwords? (2018)
- 0x38B 3y agoA question that interests me more is: has anyone used the transliteration of the Elvish “Speak friend and enter” (1) as a password? That is, “pedo mellon a minno”. I actually wrote out that line in my journal with a calligraphy pen, copying the Elvish characters - one of my favorite fictional alphabets to this day. 1: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/95265 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/95265
- spacebuffer 3y agoNo rycbar123 from Doctor Who, I guess whovians are safe for the time being
- drdeca 3y agoBut are they safe from the time being?
- spacebuffer 3y agogood one!
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> Next we have 386 passwords containing Swordfish – a classic password from 1932 with its own Wikipedia page. Not anymore, seemingly.
- sp332 3y agoThe article was posted in March 2018 and the Wikipedia page was gone by September at least. Here is the last version from the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20171028065637/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_%28password%29 https://web.archive.org/web/20171028065637/https://en.wikipe...
- buildsjets 3y agoMissing: "Pencil" from Wargames. Principal Rooney had it written on a post-it in his desk drawer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UqEg1cFqig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UqEg1cFqig
- rep_lodsb 3y agoOr the nuke launch code - CPE1702TKS, if I remember correctly. "God" from Hackers is missing too.
- Biganon 3y agoCPE1704TKS*
- LeoPanthera 3y ago"Hackers" got it from actual password usage, rather than the other way around.
- DANmode 3y ago"'Love', 'sex', 'secret', and...'God'..."
- IIAOPSW 3y agoI love how that's what comes to your mind when you think of "the password from wargames".
- bruce511 3y agoI'm with you. The fact that Joshua is not the number one on this list really speaks to my age. In my youth, Joshua was a password I used a lot, and only dropped it because I felt it was, like, too obvious. Another one I used, especially when numbers became mandatory was Turk182. But that reference is from a seriously obscure mid 80s movie (of the same name.) I'm guessing precisely nobody here has heard of it :) Who flew? Who knew? Turk182
- willcipriano 3y agoSetecAstronomy is the best one, not listed.
- rainonmoon 3y agoWhat a strange blog. The link to a Wikipedia page that no longer exists, the assumption that people would use "Speak Friend" as a password (when the movie password is just "friend"), the counting of "My Precious Cat" as a LOTR reference. Fun experiment but some odd conclusions.
- sircastor 3y agoA few years ago Steve Gibson talked about "The end of clever" on his podcast. Essentially that we've (now quite awhile ago) passed the point where a clever password was sufficient to protect you. All the database leaks have shown that many people aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. I'm not sure if Passkeys are going to prove out as a good solution, so for the moment I am inclined to say your best bet is a good password manager and long, random passwords.
- spacedcowboy 3y agoI don’t know about that. Clever still works for me I think, it’s just a matter of password length. One trick I still use today is to take the first letter of every word in a sequence I knew, and still substitute numbers and capitals. There are a lot of poems, and soliloquies in Shakespeare’s works, and opening lines of a book, etc. etc. Basically anything where you only need to remember something you already know, and where the “hint” can be something like “J12” for the first two lines of Jabberwocky. A decade or so ago, because I had to learn it for a school recital and know the poem backwards, I used Jabberwocky: Tbatstdgag1tw! - according to security.org’s password-strength-checker [1] that will take a computer 200,000,000 years to crack, presumably on average. I use a longer one today, and I skip words too, and some words I use 2 letters from - a similar string of characters to my current password is estimated at a trillion years. At one point, I was using the first 2 lines of “Sea Fever” by Masefield, but that got too long to type - ImgdttsattlsatsaaIaiatsatstshb … If you’re interested, that’s 2 septillion years. I don’t need to be that secure :) [1]: https://www.security.org/how-secure-is-my-password/ https://www.security.org/how-secure-is-my-password/
- ZydgQPiAtglF7N 3y agoSimilarly, I use lyrics of songs I know well enough to be able to sing the words correctly, but are obscure enough that most people won't know them. Jut use the first letter of each word, and if you forget, you can hum along with it while typing. As an example, the chorus of the classic CCR song 'Have you ever seen the rain' (don't use this one) will give you a easy to remember 15 char password: Iwkhyestrcdoasd. And if you forget its easy to make a simple hint (something like 'Fogerty'). My advice, don't use the chorus - a 2nd or third verse you remember is better (and often longer). And google the lyrics before you make the password, just to check that you've been singing the right words all these years.
- idatum 3y agoNot passwords but used movie references to name my machines on the corporate network. Pretty sure my "TMA-1" build machine was unique.
- pflenker 3y agoHeh. I wonder if it is still tradition in universities to assign quirky network names to their machines? Would anyone even notice these days, as these names are way less prominently displayed these days? They greybeards who came before me used names from the lore of LotR. I used house names from A Song of Ice and Fire (better known as the early 2000s tv series Game of Thrones, though the first book was released in the 90s). The youngsters after me used Pokémon names.
- xp84 3y agoThis has me wondering. When I was in school about 2 decades ago they were using names of Greek or Roman gods for servers. Part of me wonders if many campuses even have many servers worth naming now, since all the services I used at that time have now been outsourced to Google or Microsoft long ago. I’m guessing there must still be a few servers in a rack even in a cloud-centric school, but the days of connecting to like “hermes.university.edu” to get email/FTP/web hosting must be gone basically everywhere by now.
- buildbot 3y agoI would hope so. UW CSE had fun names for every computer on their network, though my knowledge is dated to 2016. Humuhumunukunukuapuaa was eventually renamed because anytime you had to type it really sucked.
- KeepFlying 3y agoMy university has machines named "data" and "lore", I personally use scifi transportation on my machines (enterprise, firefly, stargate, galactica).
- defrost 3y ago
- bitwize 3y agoBut don't forget God. System operators love to use God. It's that whole male ego thing.
- jkyrlach 3y agoI was really hoping to see a"Sneakers" reference -- "my voice is my passport"
- midjji 3y agoWhy would anyone pick speak friend as password, mellon is the password?
- twoodfin 3y agoTV, not film, but I have in fact used Data’s complete command lockout sequence from the “Brothers” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Something like 60 characters, including the NATO alphabet.
- zamadatix 3y agoThere was some movie I watched as a kid where the password was "remember" but, ironically, I can't remember it now. At the time I thought it was clever, nothing I had to log in to actually matter, but a few years later I decided to change it.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]