Keeping yourself safe on the internet

[FlailingNinja]

I hate to be that guy that just posts his frustrations but wanted to air this to confirm a legitimate grievance or to tell me if I’m being a big baby.

My problem is this this:

After several failed attempts to get BT infinity installed (this I know is a legitimate grievance…but not my reason for posting today), I decided to give Virgins 100MB offering a try. I start the sign up process but have a problem with my email address which contains a hyphen. This has never cropped up before as the standards are well established and this is as far as the rest of the world and indeed the www not an issue. I move past this by creating a new email address without the hyphen albeit a little sceptical about a company’s grasp of tech. I get as far as the confirm order button and then the problem occurs…

There is a problem with your info……..The Password can only contain letters and numbers.

Now I don’t pretend to be a cryptographist, however I know enough to scare myself out of using basic passwords on the internet, especially when the said internet site wants to perform a credit check and then store my bank details.
Am I really the only person to have an issue with this? How does everyone else feel about this? Should I just accept these standards adopted by Virgin to get a faster broadband? My 13Mb ADSL is now starting to feel dated particularly when listening to the speeds accessible by friends and family and I can’t deny the lure of superfast broadband. Is this OK or a virgingate waiting to happen?

 

[spoffle]

You're being a big baby, the bigestest baby ever.

 

[Kreeeee]

Length is far more important than the character set:
http://xkcd.com/936/

 

[FlailingNinja]

Length is far more important than the character set:
http://xkcd.com/936/

There is a maximum of 15 chars allowed but I normally I use 21+ chars with specials so this is a step down. I know 15 is pretty hard given current tech but I like to be ahead of that curve.

 

[Deus Ex]

Wear a tin foil hat, then you'll be safe.

 

[KIA]

Use a unique 15 char password. Job done. They'll probably store it in plain text anyway.

 

[peterwalkley]

Just treat it as a throw away email address and use a different provider if you are not happy with the password policy. Most ISP email uses LDAP for authentication and usually stored as a secured hash rather than plain text.

 

[Caged]

Length is far more important than the character set:
http://xkcd.com/936/

That xkcd thing that gets banded around is irrelevant since nothing is going to let you attempt 1000 logins a second for 3 days continuously. If there is a service that badly written then the passwords are probably saved in plain text in a public directory anyway, or there's a vulnerable admin login which has been left at the defaults.