The Royal Armoury · Notice the Second

VERDICTS: Upon the Passwords of the Realm

The court kept a password strength meter until the spring, when it awarded five green bars to "Dragon2019!". The meter was dismissed. A horse holds the office now, and the office has never been held better.

A free password security poster from the crown: six passwords, submitted to the paddock and ruled upon without explanation. Print it for the office, the classroom, the corridor by the kettle; anywhere the passwords are chosen badly and defended loudly.

Take up arms

The black and white issue is for the printer down the corridor, the one with only the black cartridge left in it. Same horse, same verdicts, no gilding.

The PowerPoint slide arrives with speaker notes from the court: what each verdict means in plain terms, what to say when someone asks what to do first, and what to tell a subject who confesses to using one password everywhere. Drop it into any awareness deck; the King asks only his name on the door.

The record, for the record

• Summer2026! Staple says nothing. It satisfies the policy and nothing else; a capital, a number and a punctuation mark is the pattern every guessing tool tries first.
• P@ssw0rd. Staple stares until you leave. Swapping letters for symbols fools nobody: the substituted spellings are already in the lists.
• Dragon2019!, then Dragon2020! Staple says nothing. He can count. Adding one to the end is not a new password, whatever the calendar says.
• One excellent password, used everywhere. Staple says nothing. It was excellent once. When any one site is breached, that pair gets tried at every other door you own.
• Four random words. Staple neighs with approval. Length beats cleverness, and a human can actually remember it.
• Sixteen random characters from a password manager. Staple neighs twice, an honour otherwise reserved for hay. It is the only answer that scales: long, different everywhere, and remembered for you.

To earn a neigh: a longer password, a different one for every account, and a second factor. Start with the account that resets all the others, which is your email, and work down from there.

The full proceedings are on record: the Royal Horse Judges Passwords, including the Chancellor's appeal on grounds of seniority and what the horse did about it.

The terms of issue

Take them and use them: at work, in a classroom, in a newsletter, on any noticeboard that will have them. Do not alter them and do not sell them. The credit is already printed on the thing, so there is nothing for you to add.

That is the whole treaty. The crown's lawyers are disappointed by its brevity and have been informed that the matter is closed.

Requests, questions and corrections reach the court at [email protected].

More notices are being forged. The kingdom has, regrettably, no shortage of suspects.