Website password strength meters, like a spouse asked to assess your haircut or outfit, often tell you only what you want to hear.

That’s the finding from researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, who examined the usefulness of those pesky and ubiquitous red-yellow-green password strength testers on websites run by big names such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Microsoft/Skype. The researchers used algorithms to sent millions of “not-so-good” passwords through these meters, as well as through the meters of password management services such as LastPass and 1Password, and were largely underwhelmed by the results.

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