[downer61]

Hashing a salted string of "an answer" usually works. Phone operators try to ask you the question, though, and you sit there for five minutes reading off hundreds of characters, and everyone is suddenly having a bad day, which I find hilarious. The people that expect you to maintain retardedly formatted passwords with stupid character mixtures, and expiration/re-use rules are obstacles, and I like making them as miserable as they make me.

The obvious corollary though, is that there really are organizations with systems that using publicly available information about, mixed with misinformation to see if you can discern an "accurate-ish" (which is sometimes not correct at all, even if you know what they think the correct answer is), and they don't even give you options about what public information they're going to select, to verify your identity.

It's usually a brief questionnaire about previous addresses, associated last names, states you paid your taxes in, and it deeps the impression that there are simply gaping, flawed security gaps at the core of everyone's financial factoids, because it's also sourced from poorly conceived paper-based bureaucratic files that never had any hope of being accurate from the outset.

[ghfbjdhhv]

>The people that expect you to maintain retardedly formatted passwords with stupid character mixtures, and expiration/re-use rules are obstacles, and I like making them as miserable as they make me.

The person on the other end of the phone had nothing to do with it.

[jjeaff]

For me, as an early stage startup, my devs are actually doing some customer service. I find it has helped our UI/UX immensly because they have to deal with all the problems directly. I actually think it is a great idea to let your developers spend at least a little bit of time each week (or day) doing customer service. It's amazing how much faster little bugs get fixed and processes get streamlined.

[downer61]

My hope is that the ambient animosity seeps through, via high turn-over, leading to increased personnel costs for the organization.

In general, hopefully this uncooperative behavior adds to the general misery distributed throughout the world, and all just because security goons need to feel like they're smarter than the people subject to their policies.

Consider this, oh reader, should you have the opportunity to alter password policies for a project your working on.

[icebraining]

Clearly you haven't done customer support, if you think having to listen to a long string of characters is what's going break them :)