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Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

The problem with complex passwords

Source: Johnny Simon/The Wall Street Journal

Anne says: This is not an article about telling you to update your passwords – again! It’s a fascinating problem and what I found engaging with this article was it took the recurring problem of passwords, looked at people’s behaviour and asked questions about why the behaviour wasn’t changing (even with all the information and reasoning why we should).

Ask your colleagues, or friends, what is their approach to passwords. You’re going to get a range of answers but all of them are likely to be accompanied by some kind of reaction about how painful password management is. Well, this article describes the problem – why we find it hard to use complex passwords, why we like to reuse our favourite ones, and our reactions when we’re forced to change our passwords all the time.

During the pandemic, forced to work remotely, many organisations were faced with even greater cybersecurity challenges and had to apply enforced password updates. And we didn’t like it at all!! BUT…and there’s a big but to this approach! Since 2017 (pre-pandemic) there’s been a recommendation from a number of UK and US cybersecurity institutions that complex passwords and forced expiry was not the right approach. The findings indicated that “passphrases” with three or more words was more effective (at avoiding cyber attacks) than complex passwords.

The passphrase also needs to be complex, but you would write it and it becomes much easier for your brain to remember. There’s examples in the article, which also include using a foreign language word. It sounds so simple – and you know what, it is!

How about having a discussion with the IT department security team and suggesting the change – the article gives you some tips on how to approach this as well! I’m certainly going to start applying it next time I’m prompted to update my passwords!

Read: https://www.wsj.com/articles/complex-password-cyber-security-risk-11631051077

Storytelling is sticky: how to use it in your community

Source

Storytelling forges bonds between members in a way that little else can. “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” US author Jonathan Gottschall once said, “Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”

Jakkii says: Whether your community is a community of interest, a community of practice, a customer community or an employee community, as community managers we’re always looking for ways to help people engage with the community and with one another.

Is leaning into storytelling in your bag of community tactics? If it isn’t, maybe it should be! As the article notes, storytelling helps to ‘dilute’ our differences, by using stories to help create shared understanding and connection – often especially when the stories being shared are about when things didn’t go well, rather than always only sharing the positive, ‘everything is awesome’ stories. The author also suggests it’s much easier for us to remember a narrative than it is to remember data and figures, so a story is more memorable for people, as well as more resonant.

So, how can you use storytelling? The following suggestions are offered:

• Make room for profound conversations

• Create a ritual around powerful narratives

• Experiment with different ways of sharing

Each offers ways to invite community members to share their stories and, in turn, for these to be shared back with the community, allowing space for you to develop and build a narrative that community members can connect with.

Whether you already use storytelling or you try it going forward in your community, we’d love to hear your stories of how it went, what worked, and – of course, what didn’t! Share your stories with us in the comments or on social media.

Read: https://the.community.club/community-club/storytelling-is-sticky-how-to-use-it-as-a-glue-in-your-community-30b5

At home

my big problem with the mario movie is when mario is on the tv i’m in charge. i tell him where to go. period

— thomas. (@handsome_pal) September 28, 2021

Jakkii says: some of us have our eye on an exit date, some of us have our eye out to see if we’re going back into lockdown as restrictions tighten, while others face uncertainty about opening up. Whatever the state of things where you are, here’s a few things you can read, watch and do from home this week.

• Be amazed by the illusions of these gorgeous black & white images that look like far away landscapes

• Read the stories behind 20 inventions that changed the world

• Enter a ‘magical portal to another world’ with these underwater views of Antarctic jellies

• Play one of these 10 awesome management games for armchair tycoons

• Learn why hyperlinks are (usually) blue

• Get trivial with Isolation Trivia tonight 6.30pm & tomorrow (2nd Oct) at 7pm, Trivia Livestream Wed 7.30pm, and Townie Music trivia Thurs 8pm.

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace and the future of work

• Is the hybrid work model inclusive? Not necessarily.

• Principles not policies: a trust-based approach to hybrid working

• In hybrid work, Bring-Your-Own-Application is a sign of employee experience first

• 5 ways to make the most of hybrid office space

• Workers are putting on pants to return to the office only to be on Zoom all day

Remote work and the digital workplace

• Is going to the office a broken way of working?

• More than half of college students in the US considering remote work are worried about being isolated

• How to form bonds in a virtual workplace

• Create a long-term remote work strategy with these 5 powerful tips

• Microsoft Teams: Whiteboard is getting a huge makeover

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• How to make lifelong learning part of your company culture

• The gender gap in workplace burnout is getting wider

• Successful companies offer engagement, not employee surveillance

• The problem with corporate “values”

• Why building an ethical culture must start at the top

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• Relationships between user knowledge sharing in virtual community with community loyalty and satisfaction

• YouTube to remove misinformation videos about all vaccines

• Facebook and Twitter should use volunteer moderators, says Wikipedia founder

• Ahead of German election, Telegram plays radicalising role

• How to approach topics that might be seen as ‘uncomfortable’ in your community

Privacy, data and security

• Former Apple engineer says the button on iPhones asking apps not to track you is a ‘dud’ that gives users a ‘false sense of privacy’

• How CMOs and CIOs can work to better manage data and analytics

• When the FBI seizes your messages from Big Tech, you may not know it for years

• Facebook warned over ‘very small’ LED indicator on smart glasses, as EU DPAs flag privacy concerns

• Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million android devices

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it.

• How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony

• We need concrete protections from artificial intelligence threatening human rights

• Microsoft says failed TikTok acquisition was ‘strangest thing’

• How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

Facebook

• Facebook’s effort to attract preteens goes beyond Instagram kids, documents show

• Facebook: Pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools

• Facebook grilled in Senate hearing over teen mental health

• Facebook tries to minimise its own research ahead of hearings on children’s safety

• Facebook is spending $50 million to ‘responsibly’ build the metaverse

Social media

• How social media is changing the way we experience art

• How the Gabby Petito case activated the online true crime community

• Clubhouse needs creators but creators need cash

• Social media gives support to LGBTQ youth when in-person communities are lacking

• Would Plato tweet? The Ancient Greek guide to social media

Extras

I have to stop adding “please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions” at the end of my emails because I be lying!!!! Please hesitate.

— Tevon A. Blair, M.A. (@TevonBlair) September 21, 2021

This is interesting: The neurologist who hacked his brain – and almost lost his mind

Things that make you go hmmm: The biggest country crossover hit of 2021 is a literal Applebee’s ad

Space: Earth glows mystical green in epic aurora image from the International Space Station

Podcast: How the workplace pendulum is swinging at Braze, DoorDash and Herman Miller

Friday playlist: The spookiest month begins today! Kick it off with these 20 horror podcasts that will scare the bejesus out of you

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: COVID, climate and containers: how the world weathers the global logistics crisis and a quick look at the Facebook files, ByteDance, finfluencers, Shell gets out of shale and AR spiders.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

08:47 – The perfect storm for container shipping

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/weathering-the-perfect-storm-of-container-shipping-on-the-future-this-week/