Colm O'Regan: Passwords, protection, and a kind of digital nudity

Pic: iStock

There is a brief pause. The little wheel turns. No says Amazon. “There was a problem. Your password is incorrect.”

I can never seem to get it right and have to change it every time. 

My Amazon session now has the level of security of the codes for the Enigma machines. 

Changed every day in case the Allies know I’m buying the Complete Asterix Series.

What was your first password? And also where did you use it for? Padlock for a bike? The safe where the family diamonds were stored?

The computers in my secondary school certainly didn’t have one. The green-screen, white writing ‘terminals’ were a law unto themselves.

A whole classroom gathered around trying to draw rectangular boxes. 

1992 school computers were impenetrable to hackers because they used to just stop working all the time. For no reason, as if they didn’t feel like it.

They’re a funny thing, passwords. This fact of life that we accept or no longer even notice. We have so many. Over 200 on my phone alone.

I trust that my phone is safe. But it’s only as safe as my weakest link. The best password protection is me not leaving my phone in the back of a taxi. 

This is less likely to happen now because I don’t go out as much and I tend not to get fluthered because I have to be up to make the children’s breakfast.

You don’t see them written down anymore. There isn’t a Post-it with passwords lying around the place.  I miss those days in an office. 

Walking around seeing computers with UNITED4DATREBLE123 or ClaireBear0000 taped to monitors. The wifi code is written down but then handed to a guest who forgets to give it back.

So you still have to suspend yourself from the ceiling, Mission Impossible-style to read the upside down back of a little black box.

Passwords written down are a sort of nudity. There was an exhibit in the Science Gallery in Dublin called, Forgot Your Password, by Aram Bartholl, about hacking and secrets.

They had a printout in alphabetical order of 4.7m passwords that had been hacked from LinkedIn in 2012 by Russian cybercriminals.

Somewhere in the thousands of pages, I found it. My password. The most personal thing possible. Assembled from a bastardisation of a nickname of a fella I was picking spuds next to in a field. With a number appended to it because I’d reused it so many times. I felt exposed. And what’s worse, I wasn’t unique. 

43 other people had the same one. How could they have independently come up with the same thing, across cultures and time and space? Unless they too knew yer man from Aghabullogue.

Like a child with a dictionary, I soon left my own password and then went straight to words beginning with EFF U and others of Anglo-Saxon origin. 

I was blown away by the sheer inventiveness and also the amount of people who clearly hate their job and their boss and/or their spouse. 

Then I moved to passwords beginning with Dripsey. There were pages and pages of them. Ihatedripsey, f***Dripsey1000. 

It was amazing to see the sheer amount of Coachford people whose passwords were stolen.

Passwords are one of those areas where you bump into maths accidentally. The longer the password, the safer it is because of all the permutations. Yes! Permutations! I know!

A four-digit password can be hacked instantaneously. A 17-character password with numbers, letters and symbols will take until the end of time universe for a hacker to decipher. And by then you’ll have a new phone anyway.

• Next week is Mathsweek, where other aspects of maths will sneak up on you at the end. See mathsweek.ie