Since organizations have started requiring special characters in passwords, I have been wondering which special characters are stable across code pages. I know the US dollar sign in EBCDIC is not becoming the pound sterling sign in Britain and the Japaneses Yen sign in Japan. I'm thinking of the 8 it EBCDIC code pages and the 8 bit Latin-1 ISO code pages.
Another thing that has always baffled is the idea that even if I have a strong password that is NOT written down, I still should change it once a month. If the site I am logging into enforces good management by locking the account after say 5 attempts in 15 minutes thus allowing no more that 16 attempts an hour or 140544 attempts a year, how is not changing my password going to make that much of a difference since at 1,404,544 attempts in 10 years that is still a small fraction of the 656 billion possibilities with a 8 character password assuming ONLY 30 characters in a character set? Clark Morris ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
