Hello, welcome to the Wednesday, February 8th, 2017 edition of the Sandton and Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich and the day I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

In order to make a password difficult to crack, there are kind of two options.

You can make it very diverse, meaning lots of different types of letters and numbers, special

symbols, and you can also make it long. Now one way to possibly increase the

diversity of letters that you're using is by including emojis or other

Unicode characters in your password. In the past this has been quite of difficult because keyboards don't

provide easy access to these characters, but that has been changing a lot of mobile devices,

in particular the touchscreen ones, make it pretty easy to type emojis or include them

in your keyboard. Also, of course, now some of the more recent

Apple laptops have this special touchbar, which can be used to type emojis. So why not use

them for a password? I was playing around a little bit with this today, and it actually looks like

it's possible.

A little bit critical here that you're hashing your data before you're inserting it into the database.

Then the database no longer matters really.

Otherwise, it's really kind of difficult to get all the character sets lined up between database and

web front end. You often see this and we still have problems with this on our site sometimes

where certain foreign characters are so don't show up correctly on this site. So if you have been

successful with this either in creating a site that

does allow emojis for passwords or if you have used them on a site yourself, I would be

interested in to hear if you are willing to share your experience. And then a correction I forgot

yesterday on Monday. I think it was. I talked about the timer,

...