Useless humans

Couple of stories trawling around "The Register" that caught my eye. The first one was about the guy who pushed the power button on a server and then immediately realised it was the wrong one. He had to stand for an hour while his colleagues ran around trying to organise a controlled power down before he could release his finger. Never managed to power down the wrong server but stood next to a Unix person who pulled the wrong network cable and with the speed of a wild west gunslinger plugged it back in in the vain hope nobody would notice.

The second story was about someone trying to get a system up and using "password1" as the password and amazingly it worked or proves humans are useless at security. I once had to use a tape library and to open it up you had to enter a 8-digit passcode. After trying lots and lots of dates and telephone numbers etc. no joy, only to discover that 7-2-7-7-9-6-7-3 worked. Why that number, well it is "password" on a telephone keypad. Once again, humans are useless.

Now I am not a fan of long passwords they are a pain to remember and get written down, they are also open to brute force attacks. We have all had that moment you lock yourself out after a couple of attempts and need to get someone to unlock your account. Yes I am a useless human. Come on server people do something with passwords, remember I am only human. I don’t want crazy combinations of uppercase and lowercase, letters swapped out for numbers and special characters tagged on the end - there must be a better way. Thoughts ?

https://xkcd.com/936/