Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

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The specific phrase is or isn't easily crackable, that's as debatable as anything. It's not relevant to what I've been saying at all. What's not debatable is the fact that this dude "taught it to his wife" in a multi-month span. That's pants on head stupid. Combine that with "basically a wife", and the dehumanization/patronization was enough to piss me off, cryptographic overkill aside. Maybe that's just me. Whatever.

But let's pretend we're talking about complication for a moment (a much more interesting conversation to all of us anyway), and then let's realize that this very sentence probably would take about a minute to memorize, and would be completely uncrackable.

You're forgetting password cracking 101 - it gets a lot harder, even if the word/phrase only gets a little longer, or a little different. Sly dogs instead of lazy dogs, a hand in the bush is worth two in the bird, sally smells sea shores by the she shell, every fine boy does good; what do you want from me? You'd never crack any of those, and we both know it. Why? You'd never try them. You just wouldn't. Show me the algorithm that'd come up with, "No champions, play like excuses!" Only 32 characters, should be trivial. Right?

You're still debating whether or not it's easily crackable.

Let's imagine the phrase you were saying needs to be remembered is simply "password", whereas a phrase good enough to not be cracked actually needs to be 400 characters long and include punctuation and numbers. In that scenario, you would be thinking "should take 10 seconds to memorise", whereas realistically it takes much longer.

That shows that the difficulty of phrase is of course relevant to how long it might take to learn, and the fact that other people have been arguing with you over how difficult the phrase needs to be shows that it is debatable.

So maybe you're right that your example phrase is fine, but if his wife learned a much more complicated phrase then it could well take longer to remember.

Yes, if what you ask us to imagine were what happened, then you'd be right. It didn't, however, so you are not.

The difficulty of the phrase is not relevant to how long it might take to learn, because of how cryptography works. That is, a 60 character phrase is much harder to crack than a 58 character phrase. So, the difference between "password" and "this is the password I'm going to use from now until the end of eternity" is cryptographically large, but trivial, memorization wise. So while the difficulty of the phrase to crack just jumped into "not gonna happen" land, the difficulty of the memorization of the phrase moved from instantaneous to 5-10 minutes.

If his wife learned a much more cryptographically complicated phrase it still would not have taken her longer to remember, making the specific phrase completely irrelevant. Two months is laughable, "taught it to my gf" is doubly laughable, and "gf (basically a wife)" is off the laughable charts.

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