• 2 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I think I’m confused on your point.

    I interpreted your statement to mean “adding a requirement for certain types of characters will decrease the number of possible passwords compared to no requirements at all”, which is false. Even in your example above, with only two letters, no numbers / special characters allowed, requiring a capital letter decreases the possibilities back to the original 676 possible passwords - not less.

    Perhaps you’re trying to say that passwords should all require certain complexity, but without broadcasting the password requirements publicly? I suppose that’s a valid point, but I don’t think the tradeoff of time required to make that secure is worth the literal .000001% (I think I did the math right) improvement in security.



  • Provably false. That’s only true if the rules specify some really wacky requirements which I haven’t seen anywhere except in that one game about making a password.

    Think about it this way. If you have a password of maximum length two which only accepts lowercase letters, you have 26 choices for the first character & 26 for the next. Each of the 26 characters in the first spot can be combined with any of the 26 characters in the second spot, so 26 * 26 = 676 possible passwords.

    By adding uppercase letters (for a total of 52 characters to choose from), you get 52 * 52 = 2704 possible passwords. It increases significantly if you increase the length beyond two or can have more than just upper & lowercase letters.

    Computers have gotten so efficient at generating & validating passwords that you can try tens of thousands of passwords in a minute, exhausting every possible two-letter password in seconds starting with aa and ending with ZZ.

    The only way you would decrease the number of possible passwords is if you specified that the character in a particular spot had to be uppercase, but I’ve never seen a password picker say “your fourth character must be a lowercase letter”.


  • I agree - I do use passphrases in some critical cases which I don’t want to store in a password manager.

    However, I believe passphrases are theoretically more susceptible to sophisticated dictionary type attacks, but you can easily mitigate it by using some less-common 1337speak character replacements.

    Highly recommend a password manager though - it’s much easier to remember one or two complex master keyring passwords & the random generated passwords will easily satisfy any application’s complexity requirements.





  • It certainly looks like packages are scheduled to go out today - that lines up with the “12th-13th” estimate google gave me for ground shipping. Maybe they delay shipping for Expedited customers, though.

    I don’t have a trade in, so I only have the one package (and my Google store page says it’s all arriving in one package). My FedEx account updated almost exactly the same time I got my email, so I got no advanced notice either.

    I suspect you’ll have to wait for Google to send you the “shipped” email in order to confirm your package is actually scheduled to be shipped.


  • FedEx doesn’t have my package yet, so still no definitive delivery date.

    Google appears to use FedEx Standard Overnight shipping for Expedited orders (at least to my region), so that should be next day shipping once FedEx gets the package.

    I’m gonna guess maybe they’ll release the package to FedEx tomorrow so I can get it on the 12th? If they ship it today, I’ll have it tomorrow on the 11th.

    I hate FedEx, but at least their Express delivery drivers and logistics seem less prone to theft and delay than FedEx ground.



  • I plan to buy two.

    I’ve ordered (and received) the caseology parallax in bay blue for when I need super rugged protection. I also plan to order the Google branded bay blue case for when I don’t, once I get my Google store credit.

    I’m frustrated that my preferred cases (Spigen rugged armor and liquid air) only come in boring, dark colors. Why can’t I have a Rugged Armor in Bay Blue? I’ve gotta put up with the noticeable extra bulk of the caseology parallax?