this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Tech Support Memes

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"How am I supposed to remember 12 characters!?" (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 weeks ago by TheWaterGod@lemmy.ca to c/techsupportmemes@lemmy.ca
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[–] AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 12 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Better password practices:

  1. Use Linux. I'm only half-kidding. A Linux distro will have you typing your password in far more than you ever thought you should have to, giving you much more practice with password memorization.
  2. Chunk the passwords, like phone numbers. am!z - _hBg - kj47 - GEW is easier to memorize than am!z_hBgkj47GEW.
  3. Use a password manager.
  4. Use a password manager.
[–] polle@feddit.org 5 points 2 weeks ago

You forgot about people using auto login and their user added to the nopasswd group

[–] frozenpopsicle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Or learn your passwords like our ancestors did. If something strikes you as poetic use it as a long password. I still remember an XKCD with "Correct Horse Battery Staple".

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I came up with a modular ruleset that I memorised that allows me to have a unique and complex password for each seperate service, AND I never need to remember them or use a password manager, AND torture me all you want, I actually can't tell you the password unless I'm sitting in front of a US standard keyboard which is kind of annoying on mobile, such that I have a photo of a keyboard in my downloads folder.

But seriously, torture me all you want, I like it.

[–] AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't know where the entropy is at these days so I'm not sure exactly how many words are recommended at this point, but the issue with passphrases is that you have to treat each word like it's one character. Instead of a lot of symbols, now you need a lot of words for a strong passphrase. It also has to be random assortments of words that make no sense, so passages out of any documents are not a good idea. That XKCD strip is definitely outdated because 4 words wasn't enough even 10 years ago.

[–] TheUniverseandNetworks@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's only true if someone guessing your pass phrase knows that it's made up of words and not random characters.

The idea behind pass phrases is that these things are easy for your human brain to remember, but long enough to be hard to guess by typing random characters (or even combinations of words) by an attacker or a computer (or even a LLM)

[–] AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

Or a person just includes passphrase cracking tools on the database they're working on.

[–] trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

What if you use made up words that will not appear in a dictionary