“It took me a while to realise that I’d picked a word that managed to be both simple and fiendishly difficult”

Personally, I think the hopes of the password maniacs were dashed long before the year 2000. There was no architecture or communications protocol that stood in the way back then; even the slowest PC could keep up with the rules about changing every month, not repeating, not reusing and not having normal words.

The humans were the problem. In one business network I used to manage, we had a great password policy; even the CEO was prepared to kowtow to the change rules. Then, one day, I decided to make a broad sweep, after a particularly smart and obstreperous colleague suddenly became an ex-colleague: we could tell after his rather shouty, door-banging departure that he was not only using his login to access files but those of several colleagues.

So I changed all the passwords. Every last one of them. It took ages because I didn’t want to move on to the next user until I was quite sure the change had taken effect on the last, and that they had logged out and used the new password to log back in. At the time (don’t judge) I was reading P J O’Rourke, a right-wing columnist in the US, who once remarked on how satisfying it was to type “Mercedes”. The way the keyboard is configured makes typing the word an elegant cascade, a twirl of the left hand. I must have been thinking about this when I set everybody’s password to “indubitably”. In-dub-it-ably. More on the right hand than