As I discussed the other day, I was recently the victim of credit card fraud. In light of my personal information being stolen and used to buy God knows what kind of European goods and services (fifty dollars worth of Toblerones, perhaps?), I decided I might want to take a few steps to tighten up the security of my many Internet accounts.

I have accumulated a good two dozen or so accounts on the InterWeb over the years and, to be honest, I've never been really clever about my passwords. I've been meaning to beef them up for some time, realizing that if someone were to put two and two together they could probably cause me a fair amount of grief. So, I've been taking steps to make my passwords more secure. I spent a good deal of time coming up with ideal strings of characters that were sufficiently long, contained no dictionary words, incorporated letters/numbers/characters, featured varying case, etc. Go figure, as I started to implement my system, I was stymied in several places. For instance, check out this statement on National City's website concerning account passwords (emphasis added):

At National City, we take security and privacy seriously. In order to provide additional protection for your account information, your Password must:

1. Be completely different than your Log-in ID
2. Contain 6 to 12 characters
3. Have at least one letter and one number in it
4. Not contain special characters (! @ #)

Number four, of course, contradicts everything I've ever read on constructing strong passwords. I found several sites like this, which frustrated and annoyed me, especially since I can think of no logical reason to limit which characters can be used, other than lazy programming on the back end. I'm waiting to come across a system with the following restrictions:

At We Get Hacked A Lot Industries, we take security and privacy with a grain of salt. In order to provide trivial protection for your account information, your Password must:

1. Be completely memorable and ludicrously simple
2. Contain exactly four (4) letters
3. Have some letters and no numbers in it. Don't even think about putting a special character in there. In fact, don't even use any letter of the alphabet after p, it taxes the system too much.
4. Be the word 'poop'