The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 20 Posts
  • 1.97K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2024

help-circle








  • The words “update” and “agreement”, when found in the same sentence, usually prompt me to roll my eyes and say “oh look corporation found another way to stab customers”.

    This is not the case - what they’re doing is sensible and fair. I don’t even know how forced arbitration is even legal for some countries, it’s basically “we expect you to give up your legal rights”.


  • What you’re proposing is effectively the same as "they should publish inaccurate guidelines that do not actually represent their informed views on the matter, misleading everybody, to pretend that they can prevent the stupid from being stupid." It defeats the very reason why guidelines exist - to guide you towards the optimal approach in a given situation.

    And sometimes the optimal approach is not a bigger min length. Convenience and possible vectors of attack play a huge role; if

    • due to some input specificity, typing out the password is cumbersome, and
    • there’s no reasonable way to set up a password manager in that device, and
    • your blocklist of compromised passwords is fairly solid, and
    • you’re reasonably sure that offline attacks won’t work against you, then

    min 8 chars is probably better. Even if that shitty manager, too dumb to understand that he shouldn’t contradict the “SHOULD [NOT]” points without a good reason to do so, screws it up. (He’s likely also violating the “SHALL [NOT]” points, since he used the printed copy of the guidelines as toilet paper.)





  • They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.

    The problem with this sort of requirement is that most people will solve it the laziest way. In this case, “ah, I can’t use «hospital»? Mkay, «Hospital1» it is! Yay it’s accepted!”. And then there’s zero additional entropy - because the first char still has 26 states, and the additional char has one state.

    Someone could of course “solve” this by inserting even further rules, like “you must have at least one number and one capital letter inside the password”, but then you get users annotating the password in a .txt file because it’s too hard to remember where they capitalised it or did their 1337.

    Instead just skip all those silly rules. If offline attacks are such a concern, increase the min pass length. Using both lengths provided by the guidelines:

    • 8 chars, mixing:minuscules, capitals, digits, and any 20 special chars of your choice, for a total of 82 states per char. 82⁸ = 2*10¹⁵ states per password.
    • 15 chars, using only minuscules, for a total of 26 states per char. Number of states: 26¹⁵ = 1.7*10²¹ states per password.


  • That stipulation goes rather close to #5, even not being a composition rule. EDIT: see below.

    I think that a better approach is to follow the recommended min length (15 chars), unless there are good reasons to lower it and you’re reasonably sure that your delay between failed password attempts works flawlessly.

    EDIT: as I was re-reading the original, I found the relevant excerpt:

    If the CSP [credential service provider] disallows a chosen password because it is on a blocklist of commonly used, expected, or compromised values (see Sec. 3.1.1.2), the subscriber SHALL be required to choose a different password. Other complexity requirements for passwords SHALL NOT be imposed. A rationale for this is presented in Appendix A, Strength of Passwords.

    So they are requiring CSPs to do what you said, and check it against a list of compromised passwords. However they aren’t associating it with password length; on that, the Appendix 2 basically says that min length depends on the threat model being addressed; as in, if it’s just some muppet trying passwords online versus trying it offline.


  • The gallery is an amazing idea. People who really like a game often want to play it to full completion; and this means looking at every bit and corner of it. A gallery helps to guide that effort.

    Endings

    So far I’ve counted six: The “good” ending, no vessel for The Mound, two gods, one god, reset, leaving with the princess. I’m wondering what the new ending would be. Perhaps something involving the narrator?

    Princesses

    Perhaps now you can actually kill The Spectre as she possesses your body, I always felt like having The Shifting Mound pulling her was weird. Odds are that The Grey will be split, unless the new The Damsel and The Prisoner branches are alternatives to it.



  • People have been joking that Kika and me are birds of the same flock: black-and-white hair, grumpy, shitty sight, sleep through the day, active through the night. I’m glad that she keeps me company as I’m working 3:00, although I really wish that she stopped headbutting my elbow every five minutes. (It’s cute but come on…) I’m glad that a 15yo cat can be so active though, it’s a sign of good health.

    In the meantime Spring = hot weather = Siegfrieda not sleeping with me again (she goes sleep on the sofa instead). And she even got a new scratch tree - my neighbour bought her cat one, her cat ignored it, and as she was considering to throw it away she asked us if we wanted it. It was love at first sight. Insert Siegfrieda rubbing her face on the scratch tree, as if saying “This is so great! This is mine!”.


  • If you speak Portuguese maybe.

    I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn’t even take the browser config into account.)

    Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.