Twitter’s 370 Banned Passwords: What’s Twitter Got Against Hooters?

27 Dec 2009

When you sign up for a Twitter account you need to choose a password and hopefully you picked one that isn’t easy to guess, like your name, or something really dumb like password or 123456, but did you know that Twitter has a list of banned passwords that you’re not allowed to use? Many of them make sense, like the aforementioned examples, and some of them are naughty words, but the list of 370 words also contains some words that have me baffled.

Here are some of the banned words and although they aren’t exactly smart passwords I wonder why they made the list. Perhaps they’ve just been used too many times.

access14, apples, bond007, canada, cocacola, coffee, dallas, einstein, ferrari, flower, gators, golfer, iloveyou, monster, ncc1701, startrek, steelers, success, twitter

So, according to Twitter, apples are bad but oranges are okay; Canada is bad but Mexico is okay; CocaCola is bad but Pepsi is okay; coffee is bad but tea is okay; Dallas is bad but Houston is okay; Einstein is bad but Hawking is okay; ILoveYou is bad but IHateYou is okay; Gators are bad but Seminoles are okay; Ferrari is bad but Maserati is okay; hooters are bad but boobs are okay; StarTrek is bad but CaptainKirk is okay; Steelers are bad but Patriots are okay; success is bad but failure is okay.

The one that surprised me the most? Twitter is bad but Facebook is okay.

Now I’m not trying to start anything here, I’m just sayin’.

To see the entire list of 370 words banned by Twitter as passwords just go to the sign up page, view source and search for “banned”.

Credit: TechCrunch

Don’t Start a Tweet With @ If You Want All of Your followers to See It

Ian

I think this list of passwords is based on statistics and maybe auto-updated by the popularity of the password, so a maximum number of people can use a password before it gets banned. Common passwords are obviously more guessable perhaps by looking at the users profile.

The answer in my opinion is to use a password manager, or if you need to remember it, pick a random easy-to-spell word out of the dictionary and add a number.