T-Plexx blog 0002: Forbidden Words

Imagine my surprise. One of the most straight-laced people I knew, a computing security person where I worked at the time, handed me an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper covered in some of the worst words I'd ever seen, along with some other odd words such as the names of the local sports teams. What was I to think?

I should mention that, at the time, I was a systems programmer responsible for, among other things, CA Top Secret.

It turned out that he was handing me the contents for the Restricted Password list. Apparently, people have a tendancy to choose some rather choice words for their passwords, so to keep them from being guessable, these words were kicked out of the pool of available options.

I was reminded of this today when learning how to publish and edit content on TRexxers.com. Believe it or not, we have a restricted word list here too (for acceptable content) - though I'm pleased to say it's much smaller than the one used by my previous employer.

But it got me thinking: what other kinds of words are "forbidden" among mainframers, even if they're not particularly vulgar? Or, for that matter, what words are mainframers likely to use that non-mainframers might shy away from, such as "legacy" or even "uptime" or "chargeback"?

What do you think?