PASSWORDS can be a nuisance, especially when they are needed for an emergency system and the operator can’t remember them. Wouldn’t it be better if managements decreed that systems intended for emergencies had all their passwords set to the same thing, something like 0000000? Then we could all sleep better knowing that a forgotten password would never get in the way of anything critical.
This argument made eminent sense to the officers in charge of the US Strategic Air Command back in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, writing on the…
