Just reading in that long password are better than complex ones. Wouldn’t it be better if our passwords were long memorable quotes like “Now are the times that try men’s souls” instead of something like Be$ty78?
In: Technology
There’s no technical reason other than if the rules of the system say so, similar to the “must have at least one upper case letter” kind of stuff.
So yes, you can have spaces in a password unless otherwise prohibited.
But there are non-technical reasons to avoid spaces, one of them already mentioned several times: spaces are easy to miss and check, whether by the user or the tech guy, especially when they’re at the start or at the end.
It is especially bothersome to the user – missing or forgetting (or adding) a space will leave to failed logins and that may mean having to recover or change the password.
All that being said, it’s not hard to use a memorable quote as a pass phrase and also not use spaces. Just use dashes, or any other common symbol.
If you own an Apple device, you’d see this – if you let it generate a password for you, one of the things you will notice is that it creates clusters of short “words” separated by hyphens, like so:
hF6Kb-yykdO0-f$ste73
So you can take that idea and still use a memorable quote without spaces:
never-gonna-give-you-up-never-gonna-let-you-down-never-gonna-run-around-and-desert-you
is an extremely secure but also very memorable pass phrase that also doesn’t have spaces.
And yes, it is better to actually remember strong passwords than ones we can’t. A password is only good if it actually allows you access to your stuff.
It is still much better to use a password manager, but your password manager password should be a strong password that’s easy to remember, and a long quote with hyphens instead of spaces is a very strong option.
Just don’t be predictable, because machines might take billions of years to crack it but your best friend might crack it in a second.
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