When you set up Teamviewer to be running constantly in the background, you are strongly encouraged by the UI to use a real password.<p>The 4 digit passwords are used for temporary sessions for giving a remote party temporary access to the machine.<p>In the position of the person giving support and thus needing access, I'm already very happy when I finally get my mother to launch the Teamviewer application (finding an icon on the desktop can be so hard). I don't need her to spell out a real password for me and if she was to chose one of her own it would not be much safer than what Teamviewer generates by default.<p>Support sessions like that last a maximum of 30 minutes, after which she closes the application (as encouraged by the UI). I really think that the short-lived nature of connections with a weak password somewhat mitigates some of the complaints in the article.