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Related story: For some weird reason, I memorized the serial key for a very popular software (I must be fifteen then). Even today, I can recite the 25-letter key without a hitch. And I have used its first ten letters as a password to one of my accounts. Guess what? The password has been used 4000+ times before [1]. It's hard to digest the fact that there are at least a thousand people in the world who did the same th…
Is your password "fckgw rhqq2"?
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I thought hiragana/katakana come from Chinese character radicals?
Well, yeah they did, but thousands of years before bopomofo script.
Many cultures that borrowed Chinese characters developed their own ways of simplifying them. Moreover, Chinese characters themselves are composed of distinct radicals, so it's rather natural to try to decompose them when needed. The radicals are ancient, but they can look very similar to kana in their simple forms. This could be an example of parallel evolution, not one borrowing exclusively from another.
I'm a scientist. Information theory always felt curious to me because it adopted terminology and concepts similar to that from statistical mechanics but in practice was always much more difficult due to what could be considered what was "random" vs. what was non-random. After sitting back and thinking about it, what is considered "random" of course is a statement of the probability distribution for the set under cons…
Hold up. In my physics classes, no one ever gave me a straight answer on what constituted a "macrostate". It always sounded arbitrary for similar reasons to the ones you describe for language. Are you telling me it's literally defined by the energy of the system (the Hamiltonian, right?) alone?
Some sites are throwaway (example: they force a sign-up). Don't assume all weak passwords used are not conscious decisions. Entropy is too precious to give up to throwaway sites of uncertain backend security.
What do mean by giving up entropy? Password reuse? You can use a password manager to generate a secure pass for every site, there's no excuse for weak passwords. Here's a few I made with `pwgen`, get it while it's hot: aiPh9toh_ti{XeS(a=a9ohCheeV`o8pu8woh3Epu ahth6AiT6xahaiw:ie1li`xeeF0ohf!ikeih4Joh zah6cusohNei6feithain4aeH5uul5coh/nap0ea uet7ed"ohhooquoosh3ooh8ZeeY+iepeg0eewena UuNg'aes:i!Quohp0eiGh1ibieghe&o9eiSh7…
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Holy shit! Now that I have changed the password, can you please tell me how did you guess that?
Because bunch of us memorized fckgw rhqq2 yxrkt 8tg6w 2b7q8 for the very same reason back in early 2000s
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For the unfamiliar, "ㄨㄛˇㄉㄜ˙ㄇㄧˋㄇㄚˇ" is an example of "bopomofo" script, the phonetic system used to teach kids reading and pronunciation in Taiwan, and adapted to Chinese keyboard input (zhuyin). I learned it in the 1990s studying Mandarin in Taipei. It maps closely to pinyin romanization used in China (i.e., "ㄨㄛˇ" = "wo3" which is the sound in the Mandarin dialect for "我" and potentially other characters with the sam…
Repulic Of China used to be the government of China duing 1912 to 1949 before moved to Taiwan. It was invented early time of that government. Long time ago in mainland the period was called "before liberation". I had some "before liberation" books with the scripts which was very interesting but seems to be never used in Mainland China after "liberation" as I know.
[0]:http://img1.gtimg.com/news/pics/hv1/74/203/2056/133743239.pn...
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I didn't know the well-known part. Besides, I was assuming that this was only of the multiple, multiple keys. But, it's funny how popular it is, and that so many had a reason to memorize it.
Even if you've provided information which narrows your password down to ~5,000 possible values, you've effectively handed out your password to one of 5,000 internet strangers whom you will never meet in real life. Then consider that this is Hacker News, and how many of those 5,000 have both the skills and motivation to exploit the information you've provided. Never give out "hints" about your password. Not its conten…
Unless there's something fundamentally wrong with the password, a public length of n is almost as secure as a secret length of n, and significantly more secure than a secret length of n-1
Never get into the specifics of a password, but explaining the basic structure should be a tiny impact and well within your margin of safety, or you didn't make a good enough password to start with.
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I'm willing to bet that a major upcoming security disaster is a compromised password manager that leaks out tens of millions of accounts and passwords in nicely structured XML that's perfect for automated attacks and frauds. Yes, I use a password manager too, but an ancient one that has no Internet connection, no syncing, and no cloud storage. The only "modern" password manager I've been able to find that works compl…
Well, I use pwgen and gpg ┐(´ー｀)┌ A great thing about password managers is that you can change your passwords more often since you don't have to bother coming up with and remembering new passwords. It can even be somewhat automated with pass-rotate: https://github.com/ddevault/pass-rotate
