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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I understand what you’re saying, and that in the real world, bad security practices abound among average users who are likely to have passwords like “12345678” or “password”

    But in this fictional scenario, my advice is directed at someone who has something valuable enough to protect behind a 121 character passphrase against a very determined adversary who has a Planck Cruncher at their disposal and is willing to run it for 100 years to crack that someone’s data.

    A little extra security protocol might be worth the extra effort.

    I can see how that would be unclear, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.


  • You’re describing the best case scenario for the person wishing to protect their password, where the Planck Cruncher guesses the password on the very last possible combination, taking 100 years to get there.

    The Planck Cruncher might guess the password correctly on the first try, or it might guess correctly on the last possible combination in 100 years.

    What we really want to measure are the odds of a random guess being correct.

    The most “realistic” scenario is the Planck Cruncher guessing correctly somewhere between 0 and 100 years, but you want to adjust the length of the password to be secure against a powerful attack during the realistic life of whatever system you’re trying to protect.

    On average, assuming the rate of password testing is constant, it’ll take the Planck Cruncher 50 years to guess the 121 character password.

    And that assumes the password never changes.

    If the password is changed while the Planck Cruncher is doing its thing, and it changes to something that the PC has already guessed and tested negative, the PC is screwed.

    Hint: Change your password regularly. edit: The user should change their password regularly during the attack.

    Each password change reduces the risk of a lucky guess by that many years of PC attack.













  • I think you’re misunderstanding what the article is saying.

    You’re correct that it isn’t the job of a system to detect someone’s skin color, and judge those people by it.

    But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.

    They staff are designing the AVs to safely navigate in a world of people like them, but when the staff are overwhelmingly male, light skinned, young and single, and urban, and in the United States, a lot of considerations don’t even cross their minds.

    Will the AVs recognize female pedestrians?

    Do the sensors sense light spectrum wide enough to detect dark skinned people?

    Will the AVs recognize someone with a walker or in a wheelchair, or some other mobility device?

    Toddlers are small and unpredictable.

    Bicyclists can fall over at any moment.

    Are all these AVs being tested in cities being exposed to all the animals they might encounter in rural areas like sheep, llamas, otters, alligators and other animals who might be in the road?

    How well will AVs tested in urban areas fare on twisty mountain roads that suddenly change from multi lane asphalt to narrow twisty dirt roads?

    Will they recognize tractors and other farm or industrial vehicles on the road?

    Will they recognize something you only encounter in a foreign country like an elephant or an orangutan or a rickshaw? Or what’s it going to do if it comes across that tomato festival in Spain?

    Engineering isn’t magical: It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and recorded knowledge of what works and doesn’t work.

    Releasing AVs on the entire world without testing them on every little thing they might encounter is just asking for trouble.

    What’s required for safe driving without human intelligence is more mind boggling the more you think about it.