t f The Michigan Daiy - Wednesday. September 6, 1995 -17A Psychologists say passwords lead to memory overload Not what he seems Felix Urioste, 34, right, leaves a Farmington, Utah, courthouse with his attorney after entering guilty pleas to communications fraud and forgery yesterday. Urloste posed as a woman during a three-year marriage toan unsuspecting man. Storks in shealthy environment The Washington Post WASHINGTON - The automated teller machine hums, people in line be- hind you fidget, andyou rack your mind again for the correct secret code. Is it the date of your daughter's birthday? The combination to an old high school locker? A favorite lottery number? Good luck remembering. Confusion is becoming a fact of American life as people accumulate passwords and access codes like a jani- tor collects keys. There now are passwords for office equipment, passwords for cellular tele- phones and, of course, passwords for computer networks. Some people even have passwords to electronic organiz- ers where they keep track of all their passwords. District ofColumbia lawyer Thomas Warrick has so many different code words and numbers to remember that he recently drew a blank at an ATM in Houston and had to borrow $20 for cab fare. Tshya James, of Alexandria, Va., was frozen out of her office phone mail one day after forgetting which code to use. "It's ridiculous. I hate it," said Rich- ard Bowman, chief financial officer for First Virginia Banks Inc. He has at least six computer passwords, in addition to codes for the doors of his Mercury Sable, his home security system and several credit cards. "Each one individually isnobigdeal," he said. "But cumulatively, it's over- load." The distress should be no surprise. More people than ever are using com- puters and on-line networks that de- mand security precautions. More banks, telephone companies and businesses are offering electronic services to make life easier - as long as people agree to use passwords. But security-conscious administra- tors cringe at easy-to-remember com- binations such as 1111 or those based on the names of children, pets or pet phrases. "Kung fu" and "Trekkie" just don't cut it anymore. Hackers can crack such passwords almost as easily as they crack their kns;c kIcs. They use computer pro- grams that can test millions of number or word ermutations to unlock ac- cont s. "On most computer systems, about three-quarters of all people have pass- words that can be easily guessed by others" siid Doug Tygar, a professor ofe ompuier security at Carnegie Mellon University. And so people feel compelled to come up with nonsense jumbles of letters, numbers and symbols, passwords that resemble nothing so much as a cartoon cuss. But psychologists say the prob- lem is that people generally aren't cut out to remember random strings ofnum- bers and the like. "It is a major problem," said Psy- chology Prof. Kent Norman, director of the Laboratory for Automation Psy- chology at the University of Maryland. "Machines are very good at coding num- bers and text, We're very bad at it." The need for passwords is real. As people continue to flock to the Internet and other computer services, security and privacy issues have become more complicated than ever. In the last five years, for instance, the number of intru- sions into computer systems has ex- ploded. At Carnegie Mellon's Computer Emergency Response Team in Pitts; burgh, one of several dozen sites world- wide that tracks such incidents, the num- ber of cases reported went from 132 in 1989 to 2,341 last year. Each case could involve hundreds or thousands of com- puters, said Terry McGillen, a spokes- man for the team. "It essentially mirrors the explosive growth of people on the Internet," he said. "Information is valuable. People have to pay attention to the risks." Companies are trying to devise better forms of security. Some are working to create a single "password card" that would be used like an ATM card for identification on all systems. The prob- lem is if you lose it, someone else could take on your identity. Others believe the only sure form of identification is something biologitral, such as a finger- print or a voice print. Rest assured, at some point some- thing easier will come along. "The only solution is to get rid of passwords," said Donald Norman, vice president for advanced technology at Apple Computer and author of "Things That Make Us Smart." "The very thing that makes passwords hard to crack makes them hard to remember. .. Memory is just not sufficient." In the meantime, people will con- tinue to cope in their own ways. Many simply use one password for every- thing. Eric Jacobsen, for instance, uses the name of a favorite childhood food, varying it slightly from account to ac- count. "It is overload. It's getting to be too much," said Jacobsen, a technician for the Public Broadcasting Service. "I had to come up with a system." Los Angeles Times LEJDY, Poland - The farmers in this faraway village in northernPoland live in unkempt homes, many without running water or even a coat of paint. Their rickety barns look like tired old men, leaning and groaning in the after- noon wind. But the poor people of Lejdy have something ofuntold value that even the poshest European towns and villages cannot claim: About 60 white storks, by last count, call this place home, more than live in all of Belgium, Denmark and Holland. With autumn approaching, the annual migration of the storks to Africa is about to occur. In hundreds of villages like this one spanning the continent, thousands ofthebigbirds-among the mostloved creatures in Europe-are assembling in fields and grassy meadows in anticipa- tion of the 8,000-mile trek. This year, the exodus carries special meaning, because it signals the end of a two-year effort to tally the stork popu- lation from Portugal to Uzbekistan. The international census, the fifth since 1934, is expected to involve 40 coun- tries, making it one ofthe most compre- hensive bird-watching undertakings ever. Environmentalists and scientists throughout Europe are eagerly await- ing the results, which will be compiled by a German conservation group over the next few months. "It serves as a wonderful indicator of how the environment is doing every- where," said Mariola Sokolska of Pro Natura, a Polish environmental organi- zation overseeing the count here. "The stork thrives in areas that are clean and rich with life. If the stork can't make it somewhere, then we know other ani- mals and plants are in trouble as well." For decades, the news in most of Europe has not been good for the stork. Intense farming in Western Europe, at- tributed by many environmentalists to the agricultural policies of the Euro- pean Union, has robbed the bird of its lush wetlands habitat in countries such as France, Germany and Denmark. The last census, in 1984, showed declining stork populations almost ev- erywhere in the European Union. Al- though interim tallies over the past de- cade have signaled improvementin sev- eral countries, few have surpassed the depressed levels documented in 1984. A noteworthy exception has been Spain, a European Union member whose stork population has more than doubled since the census 11 years ago. Environ- mentalists attribute the turnaround to the end of aprotracted drought in west- ern Africa, where the Spanish storks spend their winters, and the introduc- tion of irrigated farming in Spain. In most of Europe, marshes have been drained to expand farmland; in Spain, dry, uncultivated land is being flooded anew. "It is one of the few cases where agricultural policies have improved the conditions for survival of a species," said Holger Schulz, director of the In- The stork thrives in areas that are clean and rich with life. If the stork can't make it somewhere, then we know other animals and plants are in trouble as well". f - Mariola Sokolska Pro Natura environmental organization member other with pirouettes and noisy saluta- tions, and show filial love and devotion. They also seek out human compan- ionship, usually building their massive nests-sometimes weighing more than a ton - on rooftops, utility poles and chimneys. In Lejdy, some buckling farm buildings are laden with as many as four of the giant baskets. Tracking the fortunes of the three- foot-tall birds is deemed so important in Poland that Sokolska and her assis- tant, Gregorz Polutrenko, have spent 10 weeks on bicycles combing the coun- tryside to count them. Neither orni- thologist owns a car, and Pro Natura cannot afford to buy or rent one. The two have camped along the road- side, shared meals with curious villag- ers and promoted their dream of estab- lishing a stork center in Poland, all while pedaling 40 miles a day. In general, storks have managed bet- ter on the far side of the former Iron Curtain, largely because backward farming practices in non-European Union countries - mainly Poland, Belarus and Ukraine-have preserved the natural landscape. Storks there find wetlands lush with frogs, snakes, mice, rabbits and other food. There is considerable concern, how- ever, that many Eastern European coun- tries will try to copy the farming patterns of their western neighbors in a rush to gain membership in the European Union. In such a case, ornithologists warn, vast nature preserves would have to be set aside if the birds are to survive. "There is also the problem of chemi- cals and fertilizers," said Bogdan Kasperezyk, an ornithologist in north- eastern Poland, which has the largest concentration of storks in Europe. "But fornow, the situation in Poland is better than ever, because the bankruptcy of state-owned farms has allowedthe fields to grow wild. So the habitat is better, not worse." .Poland's estimated 30,500 pairs ac- count for about a third of all the adult storks on the continent. The country benefits from its hospitable country- side but also from its geographic loca- tion at the center oftwo migration paths. Storks in Eastern Europe follow a southeasterly route to their wintering grounds in Africa, skirting large bodies of water whenever possible. They fol- low the eastern shore of the Mediterra- nean Sea. Those in Western Europe cross the Strait of Gibraltar en route to their winter homes in western Africa. The clash between nature and civili- zation has become a serious problem in some Polish towns, where electrocu- tion is the leading cause of death for the birds. Pro Natura has launched a pro- gram to move nests from the tops of dangerous utility poles. In Lejdy, there is no money to erect platforms or to reinforce sinking roof- tops. Nearlyteveryhouse, barn and out- building in the village of 12 families carries at least one nest, and most of the structures have been threatened by the weight. But barely a harsh word is spoken about the birds. "I have four children and 10 grand- children, and on a farm, that means. somethimg,' said Janina K ozier, proudly surveying her seven nests. "Of course the storks helped!" - - Write for News Come to a mass meeting at 7 p.m. at the Student Publications Building, 420 Maynard: Monday, Sept. 11 Wednesday, Sept. 13 Tuesday, Sept. 19 Thursday, Sept. 21 note: photography candidates must attend one of the first two meetings and need to bring portfolios 1 SEPTEMBER15,16,17MICHIGANNTEATER GALLUP PARK FRDAYSEPWEMBER15-#01GANTEATER-PMO CRSGENT CTY BLUSMELTDOWN'-M OHN 5AURDAY,5EEMBER16'-ALUPPARK*NOON-RPM _ III 111r' ^ :..: }. f xxxxx x "i. Y. ; T i I eII R n - liia "r l f Ji -