They say you should use a strong password, one that is long, has uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, symbols, even spaces. You should have a unique password for everything in case the security for one of them is compromised. Until recently, I had used two passwords, one for important things like computer accounts, e-mail, banking, and electronic payments, and the other for everything else, like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. They had uppercase and lowercase letters and digits only, and were about eight characters long. I resolved to strengthen my passwords and have unique passwords for everything after the recent hack of the PlayStation Network, in which my financial information might have been compromised. After that, my passwords were about sixteen to twenty characters long and had symbols. Each password had the name of the corresponding service encoded in it. It took about ten seconds to type in a password, whereas before it had taken only a couple seconds. Not a bad trade off for peace of mind. However, there was a major problem with using secure passwords: they were long, and lots of services imposed certain restrictions on what kinds of passwords I could use. Lots of places, for example, imposed a minimum and maximum password length. Since my passwords’ lengths were proportional to the length of the name of their corresponding service, passwords for services with long names often times wouldn’t satisfy their maximum password length restrictions. So for these cases, I had to revert to using one of my old, shorter, less secure passwords, which negated whatever security benefits my password system had. Strong passwords are a nice thing to have, but until it’s common practice to allow arbitrary passwords, it’s not practical to expect people to use them. So everyone should just shut up about them already.