When one wants to use the services on the Belgian Federal Government web site, one needs to create an account. therefore, one needs a login and (obviously) a pasword. Now, the rules state that the pasword must only consist of letters and numbers. So, no punctuation characters. How does one generate a strong pasword? One needs to ensure that brute force attacks are not worth the effort, by using a password that contains a lot of characters, and such that each character comes from as large a set as possible. And such that the password cannot be looked up in any dictionary, i.e., it is not an existing word. So, excluding a large portion of the readable ASCII set is not a good thing IMO.
Tags: government, rant, security