Truly gibberish passwords are the first things to get written on PostIt™ notes and stuck to the keyboard. It may be useful for the "initial one-time password" before a user is required to change it, but it's not a good idea to enforce uncomprehensible passwords.

If I ever have to create a random password generator, I would hope to develop it to generate memorable yet strong passwords. The kind of passwords I recommend to newcomers.

• Pick a sentence or sentence fragment from a large library, or piece together a memorable sentence from a fuzz-generator table.
• Show the sentence to the user.
• Randomly ucfirst or lcfirst each word.
• Remove any script-problematic punctuation (if any).
• Randomly remove most of the remaining punctuation.
• Randomly replace some Ells and Ohs with Ones and Zeros.
• Show the modified sentence to the user, initials in red.
• Assign the initials as the password.

Freedom is under attack --George W. Bush
freedom 1s under Attack --george w. Bush
Password: f1uAgw.B

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

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