Allegedly, on or about 15 February 2015, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. sent: > I have discovered a method of creating passwords that has helped me > greatly throughout the years. I learned it from this girl who was > always teased in school for being "weird" LoL! (Thank you > Sharon......wherever you are!) So imagine you want to use the word > "gasoline" as a password.......the simple trick is to "push" each > letter over by one! Short passkeys, whether words or letters, are too easy to crack, one way or another. Lengthy ones are your best protection. If *you* have to type it in, you really want something that you can type easily, and without making mistakes. Adding difficult stuff to type in only hurts you, they're not any harder to the machines cracking your password than any other characters. As far as I'm concerned, the easiest way to make lengthy passwords that you can remember and type in correctly is to combine three or more words into a passphrase. Don't use a quote, or logical sentence that someone may guess at. e.g. If people know your favourite film, it's stupid to use a famous quote from it. Something like "purpleglidingcows" would be something you could type in easy enough, and picture it in your mind as a memory aid. It's odd ball enough that nobody could simply guess it, it's long enough that cracking it would take ages. And for a family situation, where you want to tell others the password to use for something, it's easy enough to tell them what to type. While some will argue that real words make it easier to crack, I argue that the combination of several makes it damn near impossible. A cracker has to guess the right number of characters, or words, to try, as well what characters they might be. The possibilities of what your password might be are astronomical. It's a hell of a long time since I did probabilities in high school maths, but if you just use letters instead of numbers, each position could be any of 26 characters (instead of 10 options), and each position is not related to any other character (one does not determine the other), so my example means that it represents an unknown number of 26 to the power of 17 that you have to guess at. Of course if you don't know how long my password is, you've got even more combinations to deal with (all of the shorter than 17 character possibilities, too). So, if we converted that word to numbers, tell me what number I'm thinking of right now, that might be anywhere between 0 and something with 24 numerals (to give you approx all the possible variations that my password might have). If you really think that you could have guessed /that/ password in a useful time, please let us know the winning lottery numbers for next week, while you're at it. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments. ZNQR LBH YBBX -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
