The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself.
Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well as car names (“porsche”, “ferrari”) and football teams (“chelsea”, “arsenal”).
Perhaps predictably for a website popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise, and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files.
Read more on The Telegraph.