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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a movie where a bad guy entered password and a good girl counted the number of characters: one-two-three-four-five. Then she noticed that his suit had "GREED" badge on it. Combining these two facts she succesfully hacked into his laptop and prevented some shit. Since then I started to always mix few backspaces into my passwords. Not that I'm really bad, but life is life.

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The backspace key on most keyboards has a very distinct sound. Not to mention it's positioning means timing will be noticeably different as well. Might be better off mixing in a few meaningless modifier keys (press Ctrl, Alt or Caps Lock).

I usually type a long string of gibberish, sneak in ctrl-U at some point and then enter my actual password

Unless the gibberish is the same every time, the repeated sound of your password will still be parsable from a long enough sound recording of your computer usage.

The gibberish is unlikely to ever be the same.

I think it is more accurate to say that the gibberish is unlikely to _always_ be the same.

I think one can tend to create similar gibberish over time. I've worked on a system where I needed to do a new signup every time I wanted to test a feature and I've run into issues where the gibberish I entered matched an account that I had previously created.

Everyone here has accounts in development databases named 'aaa', 'asd', 'asdf', 'qwer', 'hjkl', etc!

Nope, mine are all oeunt, oeunth, huet, uehis, ais, etc

You are a user of the Dvorak layout, I take it? Colemak seems like it would have a different fingerprint.

Yep! Always a bit of fun when someone goes to use my laptop for an end-of-sprint presentation and types a bunch of gibberish infront of all the stakeholders :D

I feel like the real lesson here is "don't wear your password."

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