FAREST ACCESS OF THEM ALL “YOUR PASSWORD MUST BE AT LEAST EIGHT CHARACTERS LONG AND CONTAIN AT LEAST ONE NUMBER” – SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES What’s so funny about this? This joke could not have existed 10-15 years ago in the pre-computer age or even the early computer age. These days, with computer security and hacking being such major issues, we’re all concerned with passwords. At first, passwords were short, simple, and easy to remember. Everyone used birthdays, anniversaries, home addresses, etc. Then, as hackers got better and better at breaking and entering, we had to come up with more and more complex passwords and told that we should change them every month, every week, every day, every hour, or whatever. Give me a break! What I love about this joke is that while it may be obvious (to my wife at least), it’s still a clever play on the instructions we’ve all had to learn to follow if we want to log in to our electronics and favorite web sites. The word “password” itself comes from before computers were invented, all the way back to the 18th century. It was a type of military security used to tell a friend from and enemy. The word just happens to fit in with computers very well. It’s really the word “characters” and it’s double meaning that give life to the joke. In the password instructions, characters means individual letters, numbers, or shapes. But, in a theatrical or literary sense, characters are the actual people in a play, movie, book, TV show, etc. So where else could we find eight characters as quick and easily as the story of Snow White and her seven dwarf buddies: seven + one = eight characters. Note that the illustration I’ve used is NOT the typical image from the Disney movie. It comes, instead from an illustration of Grimm fairy tales, published in the 19th century. And THAT’s what’s so funny! This joke was submitted by Paul Witheridge to the blog World Wide Words, on September 18, 2013 https://audioboo.fm/boos/1634529-farest-access-of-them-all
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 03:39:56 +0000
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