Returning to work after a prolonged absence is nothing to scoff at. I used to wonder how anyone could put off taking their paid vacation days, but now I understand it’s because the schlep of coming back practically cancels out the benefits of leaving. It’s not so much the unread emails, the endless to-dos or the jags of post-vacation ennui — it’s the passwords. In a world rife with cyberattacks, data breaches and Big Tech that behaves more like Big Brother, passwords dominate every aspect of our digital lives. I don’t want to think about how much of my brain is actively occupied by various login credentials at any given time, but I’m certain that core memories of time spent with family and friends have been crowded out by the combinations of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters that march around my brain like the anthropomorphized brooms in “Fantasia.” How did we get here? When did the cybersecurity landscape go from “Make your password something you can remember easily” to “Make your password as random as possible, and we will remember it for you” to “Answer me these riddles three, and click the image squares that contain a tree?” I once overheard the following exchange between my father and his bank while he was trying to gain access to his accounts: “Just to verify your identity, which of these addresses did you occupy between 2000 and 2010? A, B or C?” “What? I’ve never lived at any of those addresses.” “Correct.” Meanwhile, in movies and on television, passwords have always been thrilling riddles that stand between the hero and success, and which reveal themselves only by playful exercises in cryptography and witty deduction. Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) locates the Declaration of Independence by untangling an anagram related to the American Revolution. Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) cracks a case using a pun on his own name. Compare such excitement to the experience I had when I got back to my desk this week after a month or so away and found that I couldn’t log into my accounts. I tried one password, which triggered a two-factor verification on a second app, which I could access only by using a password that I had never memorized because it was saved in a vault that required — you guessed it — another password. I ended up on the phone with tech support for half an hour to reset everything. And for what? Breaking-and-entering into my own inbox? There wasn’t even an unread Declaration of Independence waiting for me. I recognize that passwords aren’t meant to be fun, because they’re just part of our workaday lives. We log in because we have to, not because there’s treasure on the other side. But isn’t that all the more reason to give digital privacy the Hollywood treatment? Why not give us ciphers and rebuses instead of captchas and confirmation codes? Make the return to reality a puzzle in itself, and we might actually enjoy solving it. Solve Today’s Capture
Puzzle of the WeekEach week we highlight a special puzzle that we published recently. This week, check out the Thursday, May 21, puzzle by Zhou Zhang and Mallory Montgomery. In their constructor notes for today’s puzzle, Zhou wrote: “The journey of this particular crossword was long — the oldest version on my computer is from 2022 — and harrowing.” Read the whole story in the Wordplay column.
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