The Clean Chatroom

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I'll give you a lot of money if you can guess my password

But please, if you're going to guess, do it privately!

Oh dear, you shouldn't use actual words, Cornflake. That's very unsecure. I didn't use to know how unsecure it was until it became my latest paranoia.

Before, my passwords were all things like pretty123.

Then they became more like Pr3tty!23.

Then they went up a notch and became more like @@@&($%1289Pw,bW@@@ but the secret is doing it in such a way that you don't even have to memorise it at all. I testify to having the worst memory ever, and being a bear of very little brain, but even I can manage to do it by having a method to make them all.

At the risk of harping on about it too much: if you use actual dictionary words in your passwords and only use lowercase letters, a software programme will be able to crack them in no time at all. That frightened me so I researched it. Here are two of the most helpful pages I found.

https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

http://www.acleandesign.com/2008/05/pas ... y-account/

*waits to see if people shout at her to stop talking about special interest*

Stop talking about your s-nah I'm kidding

It's actually all very intriguing

Maybe it will be your new special interest, too.

Did I kill the thread, or are you all busily changing your passwords?

Nope, right here
The first link of yours with the password thingy was interesting

Your cone page is very good!

"Cone Planet" I get it. Hee hee!

Oh well, "actual words" is stretching a point, but I do salt them with numbers.

Testing some typical passwords on the Gibson Research site you linked results in several tens of thousands of centuries at 1,000 guesses per second to exhaustively search the password space - but many sites would automatically block that user after, say, 4 failed passwords within a short space of time so it becomes a little too academic for me.
Sites where security is more of a concern - banking, for example - have a series of hoops to jump through so they're much less of a potential problem.

I did explore encryption algorithms for a while and it certainly is interesting - but the maths rapidly got the better of me.
To be honest, I'm much more concerned by the insecurities any user of Microsoft Windows is exposed to - simply through using it.

It's not what you think!

It was the only .com that wasn't taken that I could think of

I take a random guess that your current email password is conehead123

I advise you to change it to C0n3h3@d!23 and make sure your password recovery security questions are not set to things that others may know, such as your mother's maiden name or your postcode.

I got into someone's email account that way without needing their password at all (and that was what started my paranoia when I realised how easily other people could do it to me)

Would have been funny if you were right!
Nope, mine isn't that
I don't really care too much though

Sorry. We can talk about cones again now.

Oh, I'm not saying I don't care about your interest - rather, I don't care too much about my security

Ha ha! That's a good way of putting it.

If I remember correctly, the cryptography stratum is somewhere between the biochemistry and Greek strata....

*attempts to excavate papers about cryptography*