He's lost two VITAL passwords? This seems like a false premise then (which is fine, but the fictional premise seems unneeded and disrespectful).
I wish I could tell you anything better than "in my defense, I seem to forget only one vital password per year..."
(But seriously, I never risked data: the WD didn't have FDE, it was just a matter of salvaging the hardware; the OpenBSD was still in the middle of a migration and I had the source still accessible, so it was a matter of saving time. And it's fun.)
I imagine the password was "too short".
PS - My POV is fully critical. Please, do not be personally offended. [emoticon smile]
Off-the shelf NAS' security is shit.
For me, it helps to enter the passwords from time to time. The easiest way to do this is to reboot.
If you have moral issues with rebooting a system where rebooting is not necessary, maybe run just the password checker, e.g. by unlocking a second volume that has the same password, or something.
> Turns out all the password fields except the login form have maxlength=16, so when resetting the password I pasted it from the password manager and it got cut without me knowing.
So it could have been another WTF on the NAS that was silently truncating his passwords.
...or he could have become a super-hacker because his memory for passwords is terrible. :P
Necessity is the mother of invention. :)
(The password trunction is quite a "WTF" though. Thanks for mentioning that.)
I tend to forget passphrases very soon after creating them, around the time I am memorizing or changing a new passphrase, or after a month or so of not using one (depending on how long I have used it for.) Other people may have other patterns.
I have a fair number of passphrases that cannot be reasonably stored in password managers. As we know, it's hard to memorize a lot of high-entropy strings. I suspect that memorizing new ones tends to push out old ones.
I don't see how taking the effort to write a more compelling story is 'disrespectful' to the reader.
This sort of lie doesn't hurt the reader; this isn't the news, and the writer hasn't distorted any of the technical facts.