The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I’m sure a linguist could dive way more into depth, but “not English words” is the equivalent of “not a true Scotsman”.

    Pretty much. Once speakers start using the word, and expecting others to understand it, it’s already part of the lexicon of that language. Specially if you see signs of phonetic adaptation, like /ø/ becoming /u:/ in a language with no /ø/ (see: “lieu”) - and yet it’s exactly why people complain about those words.

    And this sort of complain isn’t even new. Nor the backslash agianst it, as Catullus 84 shows for Latin and Greek.










  • What you’re proposing is effectively the same as "they should publish inaccurate guidelines that do not actually represent their informed views on the matter, misleading everybody, to pretend that they can prevent the stupid from being stupid." It defeats the very reason why guidelines exist - to guide you towards the optimal approach in a given situation.

    And sometimes the optimal approach is not a bigger min length. Convenience and possible vectors of attack play a huge role; if

    • due to some input specificity, typing out the password is cumbersome, and
    • there’s no reasonable way to set up a password manager in that device, and
    • your blocklist of compromised passwords is fairly solid, and
    • you’re reasonably sure that offline attacks won’t work against you, then

    min 8 chars is probably better. Even if that shitty manager, too dumb to understand that he shouldn’t contradict the “SHOULD [NOT]” points without a good reason to do so, screws it up. (He’s likely also violating the “SHALL [NOT]” points, since he used the printed copy of the guidelines as toilet paper.)



  • They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.

    The problem with this sort of requirement is that most people will solve it the laziest way. In this case, “ah, I can’t use «hospital»? Mkay, «Hospital1» it is! Yay it’s accepted!”. And then there’s zero additional entropy - because the first char still has 26 states, and the additional char has one state.

    Someone could of course “solve” this by inserting even further rules, like “you must have at least one number and one capital letter inside the password”, but then you get users annotating the password in a .txt file because it’s too hard to remember where they capitalised it or did their 1337.

    Instead just skip all those silly rules. If offline attacks are such a concern, increase the min pass length. Using both lengths provided by the guidelines:

    • 8 chars, mixing:minuscules, capitals, digits, and any 20 special chars of your choice, for a total of 82 states per char. 82⁸ = 2*10¹⁵ states per password.
    • 15 chars, using only minuscules, for a total of 26 states per char. Number of states: 26¹⁵ = 1.7*10²¹ states per password.


  • That stipulation goes rather close to #5, even not being a composition rule. EDIT: see below.

    I think that a better approach is to follow the recommended min length (15 chars), unless there are good reasons to lower it and you’re reasonably sure that your delay between failed password attempts works flawlessly.

    EDIT: as I was re-reading the original, I found the relevant excerpt:

    If the CSP [credential service provider] disallows a chosen password because it is on a blocklist of commonly used, expected, or compromised values (see Sec. 3.1.1.2), the subscriber SHALL be required to choose a different password. Other complexity requirements for passwords SHALL NOT be imposed. A rationale for this is presented in Appendix A, Strength of Passwords.

    So they are requiring CSPs to do what you said, and check it against a list of compromised passwords. However they aren’t associating it with password length; on that, the Appendix 2 basically says that min length depends on the threat model being addressed; as in, if it’s just some muppet trying passwords online versus trying it offline.


  • If you speak Portuguese maybe.

    I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn’t even take the browser config into account.)

    Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.


  • Reworded rules for clarity:

    1. Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).
    2. Max length should allow at least 64 chars.
    3. You should accept all ASCII plus space.
    4. You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
    5. Don’t demand composition rules (e.g. “u’re password requires a comma! lol lmao haha” tier idiocy)
    6. Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
    7. Don’t store password hints that others can guess.
    8. Don’t prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.
    9. Don’t truncate passwords for verification.

    I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.


  • I can’t believe I’m considering moving away from Ubuntu after 20 years…

    The good news is that all distros are pretty much similar to each other, so you can transpose most of those two decades of experience to any other distro that you might want to use. Typically the key differences are

    • defaults - including the desktop environment
    • package manager and format - YaST vs. APT vs. RPM etc.
    • stability vs. newer software continuum - different distros aim for one, another, or a balance between both


  • Since your main priority is stability, I’d suggest either Debian Stable or Mint. Debian Stable is rock solid, but the software is ancient; Mint is a good compromise. They both have a nice package selection.

    The reason why I don’t recommend Ubuntu itself is snaps. Huge downloads with lots of wasted disk space, wasted memory, less user control, mismatching themes, larger loading times… urgh.

    Desktop environment is such a personal matter that it’s hard to say which one would be the best for you. I’m a big fan of MATE - it’s small, it’s nice, you can reasonably customise it without new extensions or applets. Xfce would be also a good performance-focused choice.