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Comment by wazanator | Hacker News Reader

A phone number is already 10 digits. As long as you put proper break characters between the groupings it's not hard to read IMO.

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They could also just generate 4 words and string them together as the password. Considerably more entropy than 10 digital and easier to communicate too.

English-specific tho

Not hard to do it for any language. And they're cheap to make.

    Your memorable phrase is 'correct horse battery staple'.
    
    <copy>     <generate new phrase in $LANG>

Its not often that people without a common language have zoom meetings anyway

You need the ability to enter the code on a numeric keypad when dialing in from an office phone. Compatibility with "ancient" enterprise practices is also important.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I'd never considered that!

Why not a word-based code for most people, and a numerical one for places that need them (can be enabled/disabled in the tenant), and only allows for phone connections?

This is exactly what jitsi does

Using american-english dictionary from aspell [1] and filtering for lines that only contain lower case letters [2] gives you 77649 words. For four words that gives approx 64 bits of entropy [3].

[1] Probably available on a Linux system at /usr/share/dict/american-english

[2] '^[a-z]+$'

[3] log_2(77649^4)

Kind of like the what3words approach to GIS

[1] https://what3words.com/about-us/

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