Pas$w0rd-2008

Ever since signing up for my first email account sometime in the mid-90's, my password has been under constant scrutiny every time I've signed up for a new web-based service (now up around fifty or so). It's been twisted, warped, stretched, condensed, pinched, punched, cut, and finally massaged into a highly-refined form that is longer-than-six-but-less-than-sixteen upper and lowercase alpha-numerics and including its fair share of "special" characters. It's perfect. With years of practice through entering it in countless times a day, the act itself is a thing of beauty. Fingers, working in unison, fly over the keys to their temporary destination to tap out an audible but ambiguous pattern as the password field is completed in under a second.

I don't have to think about it anymore. In fact, the only time I've thought about my password outside it's evolution from "weak" to "strong" was recently when travels brought me to countries with different keyboard layouts. It was there, crippled by letters in different positions and symbols that are completely missing from their "rightful" place above the number seven or eight, that I was completely disarmed. Forced to assume a slow, one-fingered peck and a google search to copy-paste the required symbols had me think, if momentarily, about my idea of a seemingly universal password (read—mindfulness through failure). But the temporary handicap was removed with a return to my "home" computer and country. And again, I no longer thought about it.

However, with my increased use of small devices with access the internet (phone, iPod Touch, etc...), entering my refined and lengthy password is a cumbersome process that includes digging through sub-menus to find all the necessary keys. I've accepted it so far as my computer-to-mobile use ratio hasn't been even close. Now, as they grow closer to par (and find myself entering my password far more often on the scaled keyboard) I've begun to question whether there is a new way we can think about passwords when it comes to mobile devices. A way in which a password still offers the necessary security but not at added hassle for the user.