A crossword based on the Adobe password leak | Hacker News Reader

A crossword based on the Adobe password leak

zed0.co.uk

179 pointsmdisraeli28 comments

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This is a great implementation, and super fun in many levels. Thanks for whipping this up.

(meta: yes, just a simple comment to say its great. Lets not forget to post these as well once in a while)

Thank you.

I was happy to see that tabbing worked intuitively and the clues auto-updated based on the cursor. Very slick!

And don't forget to pat yourself on the back when you do!

http://www.xkcd.com/1286/

It looks like the explain xkcd community finally cracked the codes: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1286:_Encryp...

Check out the discussion - it took a while to find a solution to the last 3.

Surprised to find "Marseille" in the 701-800 :D

According to LastPass, "The following 114 hint(s) were used by 470 other people that share your password.". I wonder where I'm gonna find mine :D

Though this has a therapeutic effect: I'm not the only sucker to use a brand as my to-go password.

brb, changing my HN password

One of mine was "password1". All the hints were things like "usual", "standard" and "the one I use everywhere". Although not unexpected, this is scary: Not only are people using the same password everywhere, they're using THIS password everyone.

I find it fairly disturbing that so many hints are of the form, "the password is "<word>". That isn't better than not having one.

Adobe accounts are something that many have acquired over the years just to get some free trial or something. A very large number of them are totally useless if compromised since there is no actually value or information tied to the account.

It is actually in some ways safer to use this method (password hint of "password is x") than to reuse the same passwords on other sites. Anyone who used a shared password now has to worry about all their other accounts, which are ones that actually matter.

Since Adobe requires you to register before you can download one of their trials, I'd wager that a lot of them are completely throwaway, or just lifted from bugmenot or whatever.

If you already have the answers right, the 'check' button appears not to work, but actually it highlights only those cells which are wrong, so if you've got it right it won't highlight anything.

Ben: Maybe when you get everything right it could give you a big green tick or something?

I've changed it slightly so that when you click check it highlights correct squares in green. I might add a tick later, though that probably won't be until Monday.

Doesn't seem to be working for me - neither in Iceweasel (Firefox) 25 or chromium (30) :-/

Strange, it works fine for me in Chromium 30.0.1599.66 (225456) on Arch. In what way is it not working?

Now it's working fine. I wasn't seeing the crosswords - so I assume a problem with the cdn.

[edit: maybe coupled with some local caching that prevented it from being fixed as soon as it might/should have]

This is great, yet sobering that people still use awful passwords.

Even better is that some people just use the password as the password hint.

I only noticed one password hint that exactly matched the password -- I'd have thought that would be disallowed. Plenty of hints that were the password plus one character, reversed, etc.

Kinda weird that the crossword is case sensitive and only works with lowercase letters. Funny idea, though.

There are passwords with uppercase letters and the puzzle distincts between those. e.g.: password is wrong but Password is correct.

Hmm, rendering is broken. Missing grid lines, misaligned; unusable. I presume this is CDN issues?

This sounds like it could well have been a CDN issue, I'm pretty sure that everything is now cached by CloudFlare if you want to try again.

Talking to them now about CDNs and other means to handle the increased load - Sorry everyone!

I've set up CloudFlare now, hopefully when the DNS settings propagate it should solve most of the issues my (pretty puny) webserver has been having.

UPDATE: Working great now. Really neat idea and great UX. Kudos :)

Could you list them here? They don't seem to be added to your nameserver yet:

  # dig @ns1.uwcs.co.uk zed0.co.uk
  zed0.co.uk.             600     IN      A       137.205.210.240

  # dig @8.8.8.8 zed0.co.uk
  zed0.co.uk.             506     IN      A       137.205.210.240

  # whois 137.205.210.240 | grep descr: | head -n 1
  descr:          Campus network for University of Warwick

Looking forward to seeing your submission :)

EDIT: dns updated:

  # dig @mary.ns.cloudflare.com zed0.co.uk
  zed0.co.uk.             300     IN      A       108.162.198.99
  zed0.co.uk.             300     IN      A       108.162.199.99

CloudFlare reports:

  Website is offline
  Error 522

The nameservers they've given me are: mary.ns.cloudflare.com paul.ns.cloudflare.com Hopefully Cloudflare can actually get the pages to load in order to serve them up. If it doesn't look like solving itself soon I'll look at some better hosting.

Lovely UX, and I'm so glad someone did that. Kudos!

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