XKCD this week had a wonderful piece of commentary about the way we choose passwords.
Four randomly chosen common English words make for a remarkably good password. Randall Monroe's example uses a word-list about 2,000 words long (11 bits per word). The beauty of this suggestion is that you can choose any 2,000 different words you like and even assume that the attacker knows your word list and it will still have about 44 bits of randomness in. And 2 to the 44 is a pretty damn big number.
This is very similar suggestion to one made by Thomas Baekdal a few years ago that:
"this is fun" is 10 times more secure than "J4fS!2"
I'm pretty sure that's wrong, but in a slightly subtle way.
More on Simple/complicated passwords…
Tomorrow night, I expect the fine city I'm now calling home will have a mayor who doesn't just fail to win the popular vote, but for whom there is a preferred candidate for most voters.
Losing the popular vote is pretty much par for the course with FPP, but this election looks especially clear we can do better.
I think we should all vote for something; and a preferential voting system would naturally discourage the mudslinging that has characterised this campaign.
More on #voteTO: voting for something…
Twitter's a pretty handy way to vent about something good or bad that's happening.
Here's a really simple way to flag that:
They're just hashtags. They're as short as can be, but I think their meaning is pretty clear.
More on Hashplus and Hashminus…
