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I'm not quite sure what OP thinks base64 means, but:

> the probability that changeme is actually valid base64 encoding must be very low

This makes no sense. The characters are part of the base64 alphabet and you have an acceptable number of them.

You wouldn't claim that the probability that deadbeef is a valid base 16 number must be very low. Probability doesn't come into it, the characters are part of the alphabet, that's all there is to it.

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I must say I never dove into the internals of base64 encoding, but this does indeed make a lot of sense :)

Thanks!

Base64 is just like base10 but they needed 55 more characters beyond the 0-9. So someone decided to use letters (both lower case and upper case) and a few symbols.

> Base64 is just like base10 but they needed 55 more characters beyond the 0-9

How did you work that out?

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