An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#2I'm pretty sure the NSA on to her. Expect an NSL in a few days.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#3I think this should be appreciated for what it is...a very young girl learning something very important that most people are totally ignorant about, trying to do good with that learning for other people, and capturing some of that value back.
The folks complaining in the Ars comments are going to either be employed or hacked by this girl in not too long. It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure password, but that really doesn't matter.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#4I think this should be appreciated for what it is...a very young girl learning something very important that most people are totally ignorant about, trying to do good with that learning for other people, and capturing some of that value back. The folks complaining in the Ars comments are going to either be employed or hacked by this girl in not too long. It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure pas…
> It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure password
On the other hand, that might help make people understand how to pick a good password.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#5I'm pretty sure the NSA on to her. Expect an NSL in a few days.
Containing loaded dice and an abridged password lookup table.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#6>Don't buy this girl's passwords. I'm a 40 year old man and I can make you software that does this for free! Don't be fooled by this little fraud.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#7[deleted]
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#8In case it's not obvious, this is an absurdly terrible service you should never use.
Here is some free software that accomplishes the same task, which is almost surely not more likely to give your password to third parties than just typing it on the same machine would:
echo $(shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -n 6 /usr/share/dict/words)
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#9In case it's not obvious, this is an absurdly terrible service you should never use. Here is some free software that accomplishes the same task, which is almost surely not more likely to give your password to third parties than just typing it on the same machine would: echo $(shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -n 6 /usr/share/dict/words)
Well, except that even most HNers won't immediately grok your command-line example, not to mention most of the people in my family or any family. It's educational at least, and $2 is not much to pay for an education about how not to use your grandchild's name and birthdate as a password.
Not to mention it's awesome that an 11 year old girl is dabbling in cryptography already.
I pay $2 for lemonade at a lemonade stand. It's not because I'm thirsty, and I'm most assuredly not going to comment about how it's an absurdly bad business because Wawa has 40oz drinks for half the price.
Edit: sometimes I am legitimately thirsty.
Re: An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
#10I don't really understand why this is even theoretically supposed to be a good method of making a password. I wish the article tried to explain that.
Here are a few questions I have:
+ I understand that the pseudo-randomness of a computer is often accidentally way less random than the programmer thinks. So, the by-hand nature of these passwords seems like an advantage, all else being equal. Right?
+ I thought real words were really bad in a password. Is the idea here that, with six words from these lists, the possible combinations are so great that the trade off is worth it because the password is memorable? That seems suspicious to me because you're essentially giving the cracker the list of possible passwords. Though that list may be quite long, it's still a list. Right?
+ These can't be better than the 30 character passwords I generate with 1Password, right? Unless there's a bug in 1Password... Maybe that's part of the point.
EDIT: list formatting (I hope).