Re: Fun new policy at AOL

[Jack Bates]

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

> So the provider allows the user to pick an insecure password, and then
> complains that they can't support a security measure because of their poor
> policy choices/enforcement?
You have an easy way to change password enforcement of an existing user 
base? Dealing with people infected with the latest worms has increased 
workloads across the board. That's only a small percentage of the user 
base. Password enforcement on an existing user base will cause problems 
for a majority of the user base.

Proprietary dialers help, but have their own problems. If you use the 
mail interface to change the dialup passwords, you'll get calls from 
users that can no longer dial in; otherwise you fragment passwords on an 
account and add overhead that's unnecessary. Adding the policy and 
waiting for it to rotate out would take over a decade.

I wouldn't recommend a policy change like that for any user base over 
10,000.

-Jack