kakarot

You indirectly state that I claim "knowing the character pool of a password lets you reliably predict if n is sufficient."

Please point to the part of my statement which reflects this idea.

I would eat any living organism except for another human and close pets whom mean a whole lot to me emotionally and whom carry transitional memories that my brain wishes to keep.

Not eating another human has nothing to do with the fact that we share a species and everything to do with the conscious psychological decision to have respect for the life of all highly cognitive beings which can live complex lives, and not arrogantly place my own need for survival higher than theirs...

But nuances aside, fundamentally I don't differ from the deer, birds, or squirrels in that I'm wired to do almost anything necessary to satisfy my hunger impulse. So I'm not sure how what you're saying makes any difference.

In many cases, I have observed that an emotional connection with another animal is enough to prevent hunting of either just the animal itself or in some cases the entire species. In a more extreme example I've known chickens to run amok and play with dogs like they were one of their own.

And not just dogs. I have trained cats to become friendly to individual rats (I think instinct is too strong), and I have seen some species express either preference or disdain for other species. My personal analysis is that this has more to do with social and emotional conditioning, a true recognition of another animal as "friendly" despite not offering a symbiotic relationship, rather than directly as a result of behavioral conditioning with positive/negative stimulus.

I think a better indicator of the difference between us and pets is that we keep pets, and further, that we sometimes keep pets purely for emotional benefits. Incidences of non-humans keeping other animals as pets is extremely rare and seemingly limited to primates. [0] I think that says a lot about our psychology. But it's a little pointless to debate about whether other mammals experience meaningful emotions. They do. Meaningful emotions are actionable. That's why our emotions seem meaningful.

[0] https://bioone.org/journals/Neotropical-Primates/volume-13/i...

Not quite the same but once I had to install Windows 7 and NVIDIA graphics drivers without a functioning monitor.

If blind runs became more popular then maybe I could hone that skill.

I've raised dozens of dogs, and like humans, some need some coaching about good behavior and some get along just fine without ever needing discipline.

That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

I wasn't making that claim.

Only if you have a sufficient length of n.

But 10% of 100 is magnitudes different from 10% of 10,000. The smaller the length, the more each percent (in terms of entropy) matters when we're talking about complexity as a function of brute force time.

Signal Messenger, LLC. https://signal.org/

Keybase, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keybase

I'm confused about how that has anything to do with disproving my conjecture that whether whether providing your length is a tangible security leak or not is essentially a function of the size of your character pool, because if your password is short enough for n-1 to contain a significant percentage of possible combinations then it's probably already short enough to brute force anyway. You're just redefining what "secure" means.

> Some consider that the reframing, in USA, of HIV as a general problem -- rather than being transmitted primarily amongst promiscuous male homosexuals -- as a great harm

I don't know what kind of fantasy land you come from but that's preposterous. I come from a city with one of the highest HIV populations in the world and it isn't just gay people who have it. My favorite author died of AIDS from a blood transfusion.

> A group choose to do something that exposes them to greater risk of disease; society steps in when the impact on others increases.

What a disgusting outlook. Everybody didn't decide at the Annual Gay Convention that they wanted to start introducing HIV into their population.

It's great that you think sexual promiscuity is comparable to the anti-vaxxer movement, but that's so far from the truth it's painful.

I care about each individual affected by the anti-vax group, including the involved children, not just those outside the anti-vax group it affects. I'm not only concerned when it starts affecting people I consider to be society's desirables.

I care about each kid involved in this crazy movement to mutilate your children's genitals at a young age to "switch their gender". Even if it doesn't affect me or other people.

I care about each person who has contracted HIV, not just homosexuals. I want them to be able to live happy lives despite living them different from mine.

That's called empathy. Caring for people outside of your immediate circle. It's something you should consider trying.

A 25% speed boost is what I would call a significant percentage. Especially at 60 characters. My statement holds up.

That's not shameful. What's shameful is that we decided that it was OK to let AIDS run rampant since it only affected homosexuals.

His family didn't want it to be public for a long time in order to avoid the stigma.

Eventually, hearts changed, and it was decided it would be a powerful statement to come forth with the details surrounding his death.

Well I was referring to the intersection between the two. Out of all of the potential people to see OP's post here, there is a much higher likelihood of at least one of them containing both the skillset and the motivation required to exploit the information than on other popular aggregators.

Gotcha. I guess I was unclear about what "almost as secure" meant in this context.

So whether providing your length is a tangible security leak or not is essentially a function of the size of your character pool, because if your password is short enough for n-1 to contain a significant percentage of possible combinations then it's probably already short enough to brute force anyway.

Telling someone your password is 8 characters long and memorable vs telling them it is 8192 characters long and unrecallable are two entirely different things.

I'm willing to believe that if you could help me understand a bit more why that is so.

Even if you've provided information which narrows your password down to ~5,000 possible values, you've effectively handed out your password to one of 5,000 internet strangers whom you will never meet in real life.

Then consider that this is Hacker News, and how many of those 5,000 have both the skills and motivation to exploit the information you've provided.

Never give out "hints" about your password. Not its contents, not its exact length, the physical location in which you store a copy, nothing.

That's a pretty good tactic.

Our government is entirely responsible for the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in Mexico with respect to the War on Drugs, just as we were responsible for:

* the rise of organized crime and crack cocaine in California in the 80's when we were also caught proliferating drugs and firearms into Los Angeles to fund radical terrorist groups

* the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in New York and Chicago after the Prohibition movement

* the rise of organized crime and terrorist cells in the Middle East after repeated meddling in foreign affairs in the pursuance of economic dominance and control of resources

* the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in parts of South America where both the War on Drugs and staging of coups and election meddling have wreaked havoc on the population

But instead, we can use this as a way to convince people that American citizens have too much easy access to firearms. Because it's really in our best economic interest that only police, criminals and criminal organizations have guns. I would be surprised if the CIA wasn't in some level behind this report, with their sterling track record.

Archivists and copyright warriors of today will be the digital heroes of tomorrow.

Navigating the open seas used to be tricky. Settling new land used to be tricky. Have faith. :)

You design software according to intended spec, and then provide safeguards for each module when it makes sense.

You don't design software on the premise that nothing works as intended and spec is thrown out of the window. If your software is full of bugs then you've failed on multiple levels and that's just one of them.

And in this case, the spec required by me and other consumers is that application and OS state remain completely independent.

> You won't get into save mode when your OS simply locks up on boot because the bug that causes the lock up is in a tab that auto-restored firefox restores for you.

I'm a bit confused about why you don't perceive the above scenario as a software bug that needs to be fixed, specifically a programmer error dealing with compartmentalization.

Compounded further by another error when entering safe mode, as safe mode by design doesn't load any non-essential programs on start. Neither would Linux single-user mode without X. You should always be able to enter safe mode if a particular non-system program is messing things up. That's the point. Anything else is a bug and deviates from spec. If a programmer tried to argue with me that the spec was wrong in this case, they would be fired on the spot.

Firefox also doesn't auto restore tabs if it was shutdown improperly, so what you describe shouldn't happen. Has it ever happened to you? Or are you just arguing against a strawman?

Sounds like an issue with Chrome, then.

The OS handles its own state. That should be invisible to applications. Applications handle their own state. That should be invisible to the OS.

As I said, Firefox offers a choice to restore or discard tabs after a bad start or shutdown of the program.

If Chrome doesn't have good fail-safe mechanisms, I'm confused about what that has to do with Microsoft and what it has to do with me being shortsighted.

I'm trying to figure out what someone's macbook being stuck in a bad state and needing an SPC and NVRAM reset has to do with this conversation. That happens all the time on macbooks.

It also has no effect on whether FF's tabs come up next time. And if FF closes suddenly, you have a chance to discard your open tabs on start.

Explain to me how my statement is shortsighted again?

Well I'm glad no one is hiring you to design user interfaces. Applications work for the user, not the developer. Applications are designed around business logic and customer demands, not how lazy the developer is. If Firefox saves my tabs on exit then I fully fucking expect my tabs to be there next time I open it up, regardless of my OS state.

> MS hater of yesteryear kept blaming MS for the large number of unpatched and therefore insecure Windows systems

This logic means that when W7 is up, I'm a bad person for not just upgrading to W10 despite it offering a completely different experience and despite the fact that I owe MS no brand loyalty.

Doesn't apply to bureau, but I'm 100% there with you for the word beautiful. I simply can't hear the word in my heard without hearing Jim Carrey spell it out.

Same thing with P-A-R-T-Y? 'Cause we gotta!

Just remember how to spell bureaucrat and you'll be A-ok.

I still trip out on tongue and related brethren.