write an essay as password ... something like "isthismybeautifulhome?isthismybeautifulwife?"
It's an interesting thing about passwords.
The current standard seems to be that it has to contain one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and sometimes one special character. So we end up with passwords like h0rsEm3at, where it becomes nigh on impossible to remember which letter was capitalised and which was replaced with a number. Automated password generators throw out helpful passwords like gh&rIk84h$jxE which might be secure in the technical sense but aren't easy to remember, with the result that people write them down and thereby destroy the security they were supposed to provide. If you want to get into someone's system the first thing to do is look under the keyboard because when people can't remember passwords they write them down somewhere they can find.
In previous employment where I had to change my password every month and had silly password restrictions like these I ended up struggling to remember what I was using at the time, so started sequencing them. January's password was Password01, then Password02, Password03 and so on (Password was replaced with a sequence I could remember)
A password that I can remember that doesn't meet "secure" standards can be far more secure in practice - "sixfunnyhorseslaughing" is easy to remember, nobody would guess it, and it's long enough that sequential password scanners would take an age to crack it. For that matter restricting login attempts to one every 15 seconds would represent a minor inconvenience to a user but a huge inconvenience to a routine that attempts to brute force a password. Throwing in a lockout so that five consecutive wrong passwords would lock the account for 15 minutes would be another blow for crackers.
Many years ago, when a password could be "uuu" (as one sysadmin I knew used, and his account was frequently hacked), I had an account with no particular value with the password "slpr". A guy I knew who was good at shoulder-surfing was nearby when I was logging in, so I invited him to watch me type my password and tell me what it was. He saw my hands slip across the keyboard and he sat there with his mouth open - he couldn't even tell me how many letters I typed let alone what they were.
