Random Thoughts 2: Arbitrary Speculations

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In the last few days, I've received a sticky flea trap, an electric razor, and a hair iron from Amazon. I didn't order any of them, nor did I order anything that didn't come, so it's not a wrong-item mistake. Maybe I have a secret admirer?
 
Based off my knowledge gained from endlessly playing The Incredible Machine, I'll say that your Agent Whatsisname is secretly trying to see what you come up with, á la McGyver.
 
In the last few days, I've received a sticky flea trap, an electric razor, and a hair iron from Amazon. I didn't order any of them, nor did I order anything that didn't come, so it's not a wrong-item mistake. Maybe I have a secret admirer?
This is something that's happened to other people. There was a student union office at a university that started receiving a slew of packages, some of which contained useful stuff and some that was just plain weird.

I think they decided to sell the stuff that wasn't immediately useful and donate the proceeds to students in need (ie. those having trouble making ends meet). They never did find out who sent the stuff or why.

If anything's useful, use it. If it isn't, sell it. You can't be forced to pay for what you didn't order, particularly if there's no way to return it.
 
In the last few days, I've received a sticky flea trap, an electric razor, and a hair iron from Amazon. I didn't order any of them, nor did I order anything that didn't come, so it's not a wrong-item mistake. Maybe I have a secret admirer?

Are they actually addressed to you?
 
That feeling when The Onion called it four years in advance.
 
My friends kept asking me to stay an extra week and I caved in on Saturday night.

Now they won't tell me why they wanted me to stay, though.

Maybe I'm being sold into human trafficking.
 
My bank emails me telling me they've been hacked and that I should change my password. So I go to the bank's website to change my password, but they want one that's exactly six characters in length and that has no special characters.

I was considering switching to a credit union in the first place.
 
My friends kept asking me to stay an extra week and I caved in on Saturday night.

Now they won't tell me why they wanted me to stay, though.

Maybe I'm being sold into human trafficking.
Maybe you're a hostage for the NAFTA negotiations. Chocolate and maple syrup are serious business.
 
My bank emails me telling me they've been hacked and that I should change my password. So I go to the bank's website to change my password, but they want one that's exactly six characters in length and that has no special characters.

I was considering switching to a credit union in the first place.

Oh my, that bank is really lacking on security. Maybe you should really change.
 
My bank emails me telling me they've been hacked and that I should change my password. So I go to the bank's website to change my password, but they want one that's exactly six characters in length and that has no special characters.

I was considering switching to a credit union in the first place.
Kinda like the telecom, with their 4-digit numbers. What I did with them was tell them I wanted to make my own security question and answer that they would have to ask me in addition to the PIN.

Numbers are easy to guess, given enough time and basic knowledge of the person whose account you're trying to mess with. I prefer the security questions that aren't the standard "mother's maiden name" crap.

Besides, there's a risk in doing this on the say-so of an email. At this point, Aimee, I'd recommend phoning your bank and asking if they actually emailed you.
 
No, there's been news about all the banks being compromised, and I went to the bank's site itself rather than clicking on any links on the email.
 
6 (or even 4) characters (assuming it is the latin letters + 10 numbers) is still a pretty large coded message.
Should be 36 (26 letters+10 numbers, from 0-9) raised to either the sixth or the fourth power, respectively.
Which for the 4 digits would be a choice of 36^4= 1679616, and for 6 digits would be 36^6 = 2176782336 different combinations.

Brute force can break both (obviously the second would take FAR longer), but one would need to actually have reason to spend time on breaking specifically your combination.
 
In the age of the internet, bots and criminal networks will break this in less than a second.
Doesn't matter that no criminal cares about aimee. If the name/email/whatever is in some database, it'll automatically be tested/broken. Nobody is sitting there and manually typing numbers.
 
I'm really tired of slender male protagonists and those "sexy" somewhat muscular love interests that you find in romance anime and want some bulky, superhero-esque body types. So I think Japan needs a dose of toxic masculinity to make sure they learn the value of heavily oversized... muscles. What the hell happened after Dragon Ball?
 
In the age of the internet, bots and criminal networks will break this in less than a second.
Doesn't matter that no criminal cares about aimee. If the name/email/whatever is in some database, it'll automatically be tested/broken. Nobody is sitting there and manually typing numbers.

Maybe i am wrong, but 2176782336 combinations isn't something broken by brute force (ie by a program running all combinations) in that little time. Ie it should take more than a day, no? Which makes randomly using the program to break into stuff not really the way to go.
Considering that (i read) such brute force breaking programs often take weeks to break larger codes, i think you are not correct in claiming that 2176782336 combinations will take so little time that it would be viable to just casually break a series of such codes, and thus allowing for random breaking as well.

I'm really tired of slender male protagonists and those "sexy" somewhat muscular love interests that you find in romance anime and want some bulky, superhero-esque body types. So I think Japan needs a dose of toxic masculinity to make sure they learn the value of heavily oversized... muscles. What the hell happened after Dragon Ball?

Those male protagonists happen to be there for the male audience. ;)

(by which i mean that they are mostly used as a 'ideal' of those males watching, and aren't there for a female audience that much. Japanese literature presents the feminine male as an ideal of beauty, and not -usually- in homosexual way).
 
According to this page, the fastest machines could do 38.36e15 combinations a second and that was five years ago. In contrast, you would only need to do 25,000 combinations a second to check 217.6 million combination in 24 hours.

To put that in context, choosing a cracking time 40,000 times slower than the quoted top speed above:
Now you have all you need to compute cracking times. Plug in your string length, plug in your Guess rate (1 trillion/sec). and you’ll get your results in time. Here’s a few AVERAGE cracking times:

8 characters: 1 hour
10 characters: 347 days
12 characters: 8,516 years
16 characters: 2,967 galactic years

To go off on a tangent, what if my password was just lower case? then cracking time is:

10 characters: 1 minute
16 characters: 691 years

As you can see, length of password has a much greater effect than character set size.
 
According to this page, the fastest machines could do 38.36e15 combinations a second and that was five years ago. In contrast, you would only need to do 25,000 combinations a second to check 217.6 million combination in 24 hours.

Hm, that is impressive*
Though it shows that you aren't an engineer: it was actually 2,176 billion :p

*i am also not sure just what kind of machines we are talking about. But yes, i suppose i was wrong re 6-digit passwords needing at least a day by now.
Also, your list notes that 8-digit would take 1 hour, while 10 digit 347 days. That should be the difference when each new digit has roughly 91 possible cases. Is that very standard an option? (eg all 'english' alphabet+10 numbers+low case for same english alphabet would still only give 62 options. Roughly 30 special symbols? Is that standard?)
 
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Though it shows that you aren't an engineer: it was actually 2,176 billion :p

So it was. That's why you should use mathematical notation for big numbers. :)

Besides, if I count all the typographical symbols on my keyboard, there's exactly 30, so 92 combinations per character seems reasonable to me.
 
So it was. That's why you should use mathematical notation for big numbers. :)

Besides, if I count all the typographical symbols on my keyboard, there's exactly 30, so 92 combinations per character seems reasonable to me.

Makes sense. Though in the example given in the thread "no special symbols" were allowed (and i took it to mean that there is no lower case difference counted either). If there are special symbols & lower case then for even a 6-digit pass you would have a lot more combinations, and - to be exact- they would rise to 92^6, ie around 607 billion.
 
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