Content providers phishing for demographic data via logins

There has been a steady flow of academic studies into the insecurity of the username/password authentication system that suggest it’s doomed to failure: humans have a limited memory capacity for unique strings of random characters, which is precisely what most experts recommend as a secure password. A pair of academic researchers from Cambridge have analyzed the use of passwords by many prominent online sites, and found that many sites require passwords as a sort of security theater, requiring them in contexts that are superfluous and failing to do their part to secure the information on their end. The end result, they argue, is a tragedy of the commons, with the commons being the finite memory of the average user. Read the full article…