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Ken Thompson's Unix Password

leahneukirchen.org

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Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#331

Post by jedberg »

1000units wrote: post #324
kelnos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The questionable behavior in this case is getting a guy fired for selecting a politically-incorrect secret passphrase. I think you're being disingenuous. The guy got fired for sexual harassment. The password merely tipped people off as to what was going on. Don't use a weasel word like "politically incorrect" to re-frame the discussion in a way that's both incorrect and more favorable to an emotional reaction in yo…

It's stated that he was fired for "being creepy", which is a highly underspecified complaint that can be used against someone you find disagreeable for any reason, only some of which warrant termination-of-livelihood. I was being charitable assuming that the real accusation involved actually harassing someone.

I said "being creepy" because I was being vague. He was doing much worse than that.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#332

Post by kelnos »

didibus wrote: post #224
mongol wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what to think about this. A password is supposed to be secret so I don't know what a naughty phrase in secret is a violation of? It is not very different from writing something naughty in a private diary, or even thinking a naughty thing.

> It is not very different from writing something naughty in a private diary, or even thinking a naughty thing. I don't know if I'm too normal or what, but my gut feeling is that yes it's really creepy. And all these things have different creepiness to them. Thinking a naughty thing is the least creepy. A private naughty diary is starting to be creepy. If it's just a passage in a normal diary, it's not too bad, if th…

I think if it was really literally just the password, it would be pretty weak grounds to fire someone. But OP says he was being deliberately vague so as not to be specific about the situation, and there was a lot more going on. The guy got fired for his actions, not his password. The password was just a tipping point.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#333

Post by tandav »

alpb wrote: post #15

Ken Thompson: > congrats. https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAG=a+rj8VcXjS-ftaj8P2_duLFSUpmN...

Offtopic. Many teams use mailing lists. That UX always scared me. Is anybody know good tutorials on how to getting started to use this kind of interfaces?

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#334

Post by rimliu »

sanderjd wrote: post #321
School-Cotton wrote: post #163

If anyone is curious, the equivalent in modern notation is “1. d4!”. Moving the pawn in front of the queen forward by two spaces. The exclamation point indicates that the annotater believes it to be a particularly strong move (describing a standard move from opening theory that way is a bit tongue-in-cheek).

What does the p/ part mean? My chess experiences is all after the popularity of descriptive notation...

Pawn?

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#335

Post by outworlder »

Thrymr wrote: post #229
melling wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years ago I cracked everyone’s Unix password on an old Sun computer. It didn’t take long because everyone had a password that was in the dictionary. Needless to say, people were not happy with the messenger.

30 years ago you could just sniff the passwords on the local subnet because everyone was using telnet and ftp in the clear.

20 years ago you could also sniff passwords for all Windows users in the same subnet as you. Windows used the NTLM scheme which was known to be weak even back then. An AMD K6 running overnight cracked almost all of them at my university's lab, including the Active Directory domain admin.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#337

Post by codegladiator »

tandav wrote: post #333
alpb wrote: post #15

Ken Thompson: > congrats. https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAG=a+rj8VcXjS-ftaj8P2_duLFSUpmN...

Offtopic. Many teams use mailing lists. That UX always scared me. Is anybody know good tutorials on how to getting started to use this kind of interfaces?

Each reply has its own page, just click next/prev to follow the thread (or jump using the tree at the bottom)

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#338

Post by CydeWeys »

austincheney wrote: post #270
jackcodes wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every 90 days is the god pattern

A better pattern is something long that will exceed the bounds of a rainbow table. I love JavaScript but I really wish it didn't have the ASI feature* The example is 67 characters long written in a statement that is easy to remember with two non-alpha characters aside from the spaces. Imagine the size of rainbow table it would take to crack that.

I enter my password so many times each day (every time I step away from my computer and then come back to it, for example), so having such a long password would be quite the annoyance. Plus it's easy to make a typo and not realize it in a long sentence when you can't see what you're typing.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#339

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly »

melling wrote: post #23
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #5

I'm shocked at how well the old hashing stood up; sure, it's totally crackable today, but a well-picked password still took 4+ days to crack on modern hardware, which is remarkable. (Granted, it doesn't sound like they did anything fancy like throwing a hundred cloud instances at it or something; I'm not saying you should use DES today:) )

30 years ago I cracked everyone’s Unix password on an old Sun computer. It didn’t take long because everyone had a password that was in the dictionary. Needless to say, people were not happy with the messenger.

You can't really blame them... it was called a pass "word".
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