Month: July 2009

Jakob Nielsen Argues for Abandoning Password Masking on Websites

Jakob Nielsen makes the case against password masking — the convention of displaying asterisks or some other symbol instead of the actual characters typed in password entry boxes. Nielsen notes that password masking was originally implemented as a security measure, but questions just how much security it adds under the conditions most of us use the web,

Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users’ shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn’t even protect fully against snoopers.

Nielsen suggests adding a  check box so users could decide whether or not to have their passwords masked so, for example, users in genuinely public situations such as at a public web terminal could still choose to have their passwords masked.

Nielsen argues this is one case where going against convention would be beneficial, but I wonder if he’s done any user-testing of this. My suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of users will assume there is something wrong with a website when the password isn’t masked and thereby likely cause even more confusion.

The standard on mobile devices of not masking the current character but masking previous characters is a good compromise and is becoming so widespread it may eventually break down that convention, but for now its hard to imagine a site abandoning password masking wouldn’t create more confusion and anxiety in its users than the problem it would allegedly solve.

Yet Another Survey Reporting Decline in Religious Belief in the United States

The Ada Evening News has a nice story on a Trinity College survey of religious attitudes in the United States that has found the same rise of secularism as similar studies,

Trinity College conducted the American Religious Identification Survey, which analyzed religious trends occurring in the U.S. during the last 18 years. The results were not good for people of faith.

According to the survey, the groups that experienced the largest increase were those belonging to no religion, which had a 138 percent growth in the 18-year period. The number of non-religious groups, which includes atheists and agnostics, grew from 14.3 million in 1990 to 34.1 million in 2008.

While atheism and agnosticism have increased, the number of those who consider themselves Christians has decreased, with 86 percent claiming to be Christian in 1990 compared to the 76 percent in 2008.

One of the more interesting questions that is rarely answered sufficiently is “why?” For example, there has long been an obvious disparity between the level of religious belief in the United States vs. Europe. A current favorite explanation of that difference is that religious institutions act as a bulwark against economic downtimes and, as such, is not viewed as favorably in Europe where the welfare state tends to take on that role, but is popular in the United State which has the highest level of economic inquality of any modern industrial nation. Which would not explain at all why people are suddenly turning to secular ideologies over the past 20 years which have hardly seen a turn to a European-like welfare state.

Similarly, another claim is that since the United States doesn’t pick and choose religious winners with targeted subsidies and official approval, that competition between denominations and religions has meant those organizations had to innovate to meet the needs of people, whereas in Europe supposedly direct state funding and endorsement of specific denominations and religions led those winners to stagnate and become distanced from what people were genuinely looking for. Again, that doesn’t hold up very well if people are suddenly abandoning that religious market for non-religious views.

It would be interesting to see a survey of atheists, agnostics and other non-believers to see if there are one or two factors that stand out that are driving them away from religion.