Seems hard to remember. Could it be a collision?
It's a chess move
Ken Thompson's Unix Password
41–50 of 665 posts
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#42I'm disappointed that it followed a pattern like that, since that's supposed to make it easier to brute-force guess.
I agree, but didn't seem to help in this case though :-)
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#43Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#44Seems hard to remember. Could it be a collision?
It's a chess opening, in an older notation. But for someone into chess in the 70s, it wouldn't be hard to remember.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#45> Did he really use uppercase letters or even special chars? Why would he not? I'm obviously missing something here.
The early days of mainframes had some groups of individuals who advocated for no passwords or just your username again as a password: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html
you're confusing mainframes with UNIX microcomputers, and 1983 wasn't early.
Also, I rememebr when FSF hosted UNIX machines at MIT that you could telnet into without a password. It was a total mess.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#46I was able to log into his facebook and twitter accounts using that same password! Edit : Ha ha, this is a bad joke!
Uh oh. No 2FA? Definitely send him an email about that.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#47I'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.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#48A slight nitpick with the article - `p/q2-q4` (more commonly written as "1. d4" in modern times) is not the Closed Game, it's just the first move of it. There are many, many other lines after 1. d4 besides just 1. ..d5, most of them quite open!
It is the beginning of the closed game, which is what the article says. Seems like a vacuous nitpick.
Not if you play chess. 1. d4 is played probably more than half the time in professional games. It can lead to lots of different openings, closed and open (but not at the same time).
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#49Seems hard to remember. Could it be a collision?
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Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#50Interestingly enough, this password does not show up on haveibeenpwnd!