Can you please pass the password?

Imagine the look on Ali Baba's face if, while going to save his brother Cassim, he were to say “Open Sesame” and the cave replies “Wrong password”.

Every morning, when I turn on the computer and try and access the vaults the virtual world is increasingly getting locked into, I feel this niggle of doubt. Will I recall their damn passwords? From travel booking sites to bank accounts to emails to social networking sites, there are just too many passwords to remember.

Okay, these I can understand, but an information junkie like me is getting increasingly locked out of sites like Financial Times , management journals and other publications as they can be accessed only through passwords — which I have forgotten. Life seems like one long memory game.

Of course you can, like some of my colleagues very patronisingly suggest, keep the same password across all sites. Indeed, till a few months ago I did just that.

Only to be told this summer — after the Sony PlayStation password disaster — that it's the most foolish virtual behaviour possible. The files of 77 million users giving out names, addresses, user names and passwords had been stolen from Sony.

At once an advisory went out saying cyber criminals could hack into credit card and bank accounts as most Internet users tend to replicate passwords.

A whole host of research was wheeled out to show that two-thirds of the 2 billion Internet users use the same password for everything from their bank account, their credit card verification site to their email ids and gaming networks.

Companies sent peeved notes on how imprudent this online behaviour was. The only secure way on the Internet, they grated, was to create unique passwords.

So, wearily, I went about creating multiple passwords again. Only to be brought up short by an increasingly failing memory.

Meanwhile, my geeky friends had told me that there was nothing wrong with keeping same passwords. They blamed companies for not encrypting passwords.

And, they said, it's up to companies to come up with double checks — Google, Yahoo and a host of others do have a two-factor identification process, which people like me find infuriating but is probably necessary. Each time I see those squiggles that I have to identify in order to get in, it sends me up the wall.

Some of my techie friends, who clearly have a better memory than me, have other gripes. They say that companies don't give enough thought to the security issue, that they force you to choose weak passwords by putting constraints on length, discriminating against character types and so on. “We could create really, really secure passwords,” they boast.

In the meantime, some enterprising companies have come along and tried to make money from this.

I am told there are solutions such as 1password, where you fork out some money to create one truly secure password. And then you enter a sort of Internet vault where you lock in your simpler passwords to other sites. How tedious.

There has to be a simpler solution. And there is, by Jove!

HP's Chief Marketing Officer Ranjivjit Singh says the age of touch-screen could yield that solution. While demonstrating the company's new laptop series, he showed me how for many sites, you can now just swipe your finger on the screen. Back to the angootha (thumb impression), so to speak. Old is gold.

The way technology is moving — with cameras embedded into everything, and sensors located seemingly everywhere — he said the fingerprint password is now going to be the new big thing.

Now I can't wait for this change. Can the companies please pull their thumbs out and adopt this?

Before another big security lapse happens, and I have to go and change all my passwords all over again?

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