Digitally Curious

CHAPTER 15STAYING SAFE IN THE AGE OF AI

As the resident tech expert among my friends, I’m always being asked for technical advice. If I was to rank the types of issues I’m asked to help with, number one would be creating, managing, and remembering passwords.

A few of my friends have a physical book of passwords and write them all down. Sadly, possibly like most of my readers, the passwords you use across multiple websites are the same or similar, because it is becoming so hard to remember them all.

Like many of you, I started my digital life with a simple password. I recall it was “huxley” created back in 1986 when I was studying a science degree at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and the “green screen” university computer terminal asked me to “choose a password”. This password was, of course, named after Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, mentioned in the Introduction.

Some years later, when I was entering what I thought was this brilliant password into a new system, it had the nerve to tell me that this password was too simple! It was time to understand how password management would become key in my digital career.

Those who are fans of British comic Michael McIntyre may have seen his Netflix special where he talks about passwords.¹ In his show he reveals that many of us are guilty of creating a password with a 1 and a $ at the end when told that “Password” is not strong enough and we need to add numbers and “special characters”.

I used to have just three ...