Furies did help build the internet. (Seriously we were there from the start)
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For those who care, the “ucdort” in Özalp Babaoğlu’s password is Turkish for “threefour” ( üç=3 dört=4).
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I admit I laughed out loud when I read bir iki üç dört. Who knew that 1234 was a good password?
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I get a similar result from a 3mg tablet of melatonin: being curb-stomped by the sandman. A tiny crumb from a tablet does fine for me.
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And that’s a good reminder that any mid-to-high-end desktop computer these days is a supercomputer far beyond the original Cray-1.
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cray-1: 160 MFLOPS
cray-2: 1.9 GFLOPS
ipad 2 1.5 GFLOPS
And the ipad 2 has been sort of left in the dust.
The applicability of floating point to DES cryptography is doubtful.
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True, but the GPUs we have now can do massive numbers of parallel computations (another supercomputer specialty).
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I wish I could say I understood any of that.
What does it mean?
…and promptly get arrested for violating the DMCA.
When an account is created on a unix system, the user chooses a password, This password is encrypted by the computer using special parameters and stored in /etc/passwd.
When the user logs on to a unix system, the system encrypts what was entered as the password, using the previous parameters and compares the encrypted result against what is stored in /etc/passwd. (It would be horribly dangerous to store a plaintext version of the passwd file on the computer)
Because of its historical significance, this particular copy of /etc/passwd was copied, archived, and uploaded to the internet, along with the rest of the sourcecode.
Using an awful lot of computing power, the passwd file has been decrypted to reveal the original passwords that various historical figures used to log onto this machine.
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Thank you, that makes perfect sense. But it does bring into focus how little I know about the devices I use every day – must try harder.
A more authoritative accoiunt can be found here:
specifically
Unix avoids this problem by not keeping actual passwords anywhere on the system. Instead, Unix stores a value that is generated by using the password to encrypt a block of zero bits with a one-way function called crypt( ) ; the result of the calculation was traditionally stored in the /etc/passwd file.[41] When you try to log in, the program /bin/login does not decrypt the stored password. Instead, /bin/login takes the password that you typed, uses it to transform another block of zeros, and compares the newly transformed block with the block stored in the /etc/passwd file. If the two encrypted results match, the system lets you in.
The security of this approach rests upon the strength of the encryption algorithm and the difficulty of guessing the user’s password. To date, the crypt ( ) algorithm and its successors have proven highly resistant to attacks. Unfortunately, users have a habit of picking easy-to-guess passwords, which creates the need for shadow password files.
and here is the paper that describes it
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Thank you again for your efforts, much appreciated.
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I thought for sure it would be Ped0Ph!le or something like that.
Usually it’s a good idea not to use obvious passwords.
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