The typical U.S. user can have up to 130 online accounts and hopefully, they have 130 different passwords on these accounts. When setting up the 130 different passwords on these 130 accounts – you have undoubtedly seen the hate message
Password must include at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, a number, and a special character.
Why is it called an uppercase or lowercase letter?
It is Gutenberg’s fault
The story goes back to Gutenberg‘s innovation of moveable type and the printing press (1450 A.D.). With Gutenberg’s printing press the compositor (“person who sets the type or text for printing”) stored the individual pieces of metal type in boxes called cases. The smaller letters (along with the type for punctuation and spaces), which were used most often, were kept in a lower case that was easier to reach. Capital letters, which were used less frequently, were kept in an upper case. Because of this old storage convention, we still refer to small letters as lowercase and capital letters as uppercase.
Notice the uppercase letters had slots of equal size, while the lowercase letters (more often used) had slots proportional to their frequency of use (in English).
The terms quickly became convention, because then a typesetter from one press could quickly adapt to another press. Now the terms are so generic that they are used even in handwriting instruction.
No more uppercase in passwords
Fortunately, the tide against using case as a password complexity factor has turned. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) now recommends everyone use longer passwords or passphrases of 15 or more characters without requiring uppercase, lowercase or special characters. NIST 800-63B says enforcing unnecessary password complexity requiring a mix of special characters, numbers and uppercase letters is a practice that can stop.
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The distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters doesn’t exist in all languages, though. Certain Eastern and Asian writing systems, including certain Indian, Chinese, and Japanese alphabets, do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters.
Related article
- A computer can guess more than 100 billion passwords per second — still think yours is secure? (The Next Web)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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