In short, we are being admonished to use crazy hard passwords with numbers, characters, and random letters…and then being asked for our dog’s name in case we forget our password.

The article said the only way to play it safe is to use secondary passwords, equally complex, for the back up to the main password – too much personal information, like our dog’s name, is available to friends, via MySpace, etc.

Plus it hardly makes sense to have a complex password as the first line of defense then a simple noun, for example, as the “backdoor” password.