passwords

my bank has the worst security for their online banking. honest.

for years, the only security feature (if you can call it a feature) was the password: seven letters or less, alpha-numeric. you couldn't even use punctuation symbols.

i guess there was one other security feature: if you messed up your password three times, it would lock your account. once locked, an account had to be reset by calling the bank during business hours and talking to a teller...

at some point the bank decided that this security was insufficient. but instead of improving their existing security (i.e. by letting me use a password of sufficient length), they decided to supplement it.