How do you memorise 6-digit authentication codes?

If I confirm any 10 digit number (phone number or otherwise) I would divide it into groups of 2 or 4 digits. I would never use a combination that switched between a group with an even number of digits and a group of 3 digits.

For example: 4+4+2 or 4+2+4 etc is okay. But 3+3+4 is not.

On the other hand, a 9 digit number gets special treatment (from me!) and is preferably spken as 3 groups of 3 digits.

I've heard people use the weirdest groupings for 8 digit bank account number, when there's nothing simpler than 4+4 digits. Add a bit of rising intonation at the end of each 4 digit group and it's a doddle to convey.

As UK mobile numbers all start 07, I tend to say my own number as 07 999 999 999.

To add to the confusion, two of the letters in your French '20' are also consistently reversed!

Though it doesn't help if you are keying the digits as you (think you) hear them, rather than writing it down, validating the number of digits and any non-permitted combinations, and then dialling.

The grouping into twos or threes is fairly immaterial, but I can't understand where the convention arose to read out phone numbers with hundreds, tens and units weighting to the digits in each group "one hundred and thirty seven" rather than "one two three". Especially for German or Dutch where the tens and units are reversed (one extra stage of disentangling).

As a matter of interest, what is the convention in France, Germany etc for reading out other streams of digits such as credit card numbers, electricity or gas account numbers etc - are those grouped into twos and read out as tens-and-units? Or are they read out as separate digits, with a pause every two or three digits?

Apologies. At least I was consistent... ly wrong ;-)

Vingt. Vingt. Vingt. I'll write 100 lines before bedtime ;-)

Part of the problem is that I've looked at the spelling of both so many times now that mine actually looks "right" and the other looks "wrong". I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have been mis-spelling it for a loooooong time - maybe I got it wrong at school and it was never picked up, and the habit has stuck.

Chunking comes with it, some RLE (run length encoding) by the operator. You can be remembering the first cluster as "zero and four threes". There is a tendency to chunk such that repeated digits are at the beginning ot the end of the chunk. As if doing it as "an RLE bit plus a sound".

Humans are both crafty... and lazy.

Paul

I am fighting Apples latest security at the moment which when I look at passwords gives advice about passwords being week or using common words or sequences, and threatens to use its own totally unmemorable ones, but forgetting that you have devices on Windows with the same passwords and you would then have to go about changing everything over manually. It complains if you use the log in with my google account as a data leak since the password has been used more than once, and as you say, if you use an extra verification as well it just makes it far more hassle to do anything at all. Result? You do not do anything that uses bank or other sensitive info on line at all, but the banks keep on cutting their phone staff and you cannot do things that way either. Bah Humbug. Brian

snip

My satnav does that to three and four digit road numbers. I must admit I thought it must be an Americanism.

I write it down.

Around thirty years ago, I moved to a house in a small town - and had a four-digit phone number. In itself, not a problem, but everyone else in the town only had three digit numbers. Others in the town would keep making mistakes and dropping one or other digit because they simply assumed all numbers had three digits.

Obviously all now long gone.

I found the problem more difficult when I had to enter the number into an app on my phone to buy a ticket at a Swiss railway station.

Why do you need to memorise it at all? It is a one time code that only needs to be in short term memory for at most a few seconds as 123456.

More of a problem for me is poor signal resulting in the website timing out whilst I wait for the authentication code to arrive. Last week I had to go and wave the phone around in the garden to get enough signal for the SMS to arrive. First time round it failed at fifteen minute timeout :(

Another good reason for having a virtual mobile number, I have one from Andrews and Arnold, costs £1.20/month and well worth it IMHO. The code arrives just about instantly and I can simply copy/paste it into my browser, no memory required.

iphones do this automatically. They extract sms codes ready for you to paste into whatever field you want.

Why would I ned to memorise it? It is on my phone.

I can, however, remember a nine long string of random characters that was a password I had use to get online in the early days of dial-up modems. I had to type it in every time and the daily repetition burned it into my memory.

If you've got the phone with the text message in front of you you can always glance back at it to check you've entered it right.

What annoys me is when they provide a URL instead of a number. The phone I use for texts and voice is a feature phone with no Wi-Fi and minimal Internet access; I usually have to forward the text to a smartphone.

But I don't use any sort of mobile phone for anything where anyone would send me a security code so, from my point of view, that's quite irrelevant! :-)

For me it depends on the numbers themselves. Sometimes it easier in pairs or 3-3 or even 4-2 or 2-4 But mostly I don't find I need to remmeber them.

When on-line backing or logging in to MS-teams or outlook, they send a sms and that goes to iMessage and that opens up asking to you want to use this code and it's sorted.

People do that to me so often! And then usually I genuinely cannot say whether they have it correct or not.