• 0 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 7th, 2023

help-circle













  • That’s only really true if you’re going to be storing the password in a secure vault after randomly generating it; otherwise, it’s terrible because 1) nobody will be able to remember it so they’ll be writing it down, and 2) it’ll be such a pain to type that people will find ways to circumvent it at every possible turn

    Pass phrases, even when taken with the idea that it’s a limited character set that follows a semi predictable flow, if you look at it in terms of the number of words possible it actually is decently secure, especially if the words used are random and not meaningful to the user. Even limiting yourself to the 1000 most common words in the English language and using 4 words, that’s one trillion possible combinations without even accounting for modifying capitalisation, adding a symbol or three, including a short number at the end…

    And even with that base set, even if a computer could theoretically try all trillion possibilities quickly, it’ll make a ton of noise, get throttled, and likely lock the account out long before it has a chance to try even the tiniest fraction of them

    Your way is theoretically more secure, but practically only works for machines or with secure password storage. If it’s something a human needs to remember and type themselves, phrases of random words is much more viable and much more likely to be used in a secure fashion.




  • Also, even when you actually get an error message (which you probably had to dig through the awful mess that is the event viewer… Seriously, the only update they’ve made to it in the last twenty years was to split a bunch of things into a ton of individual logs that are more than painful to dig through), it’s cryptic (if it tells you anything at all) and pasting it into search gives you nothing relevant, and quoting it gives you nothing at all (even the part that’s obviously the generic part of the error), or if it does, it’s a couple hits with people asking for help and either getting no replies, unhelpful replies that misunderstand the issue, or tells them they’re asking in the wrong Microsoft support forum

    Like… Come on, Microsoft. You clearly coded this error in the operating system. Put at least one page in documents online with at least something useful about it…