Posted on 01/14/2021 12:32:41 PM PST by Onthebrink
What if forgetting your password for a website could cost you $200 million? That’s the situation facing a programmer living in San Francisco. From the Times:
Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
I bet it is: password123
My wife has this super convoluted way of managing her passwords and tracking them ... I just use Keeper.
I don’t see there being problem in recovering the coins considering the total value of them.
You can find investors and resources that will buy into the effort in return for a percentage.
It’s not like you are trying to crack 2TB of data. Drives have known limited structures in their early blocks and file system layouts. You just need to focus on those. In cryptology that is a huge, huge advantage. I would make a deal with a company like NVIDIA, asking them to loan a few thousand high GPU cards for a massively parallel cracker. Of course in return for a cut.
You have the disk company of the IronKey drives helpout for cut.
I use Keeper as well. My wife and her son are on it. I just paid the yearly subscription of $75.
I like it. I have it on my computers and on my cell phone.
So this is what passed for a story on National Review these days? No wonder the country’s in a sh*thole.
Password proliferation has been a serious issue for quite some time. People use all kinds of stupid and otherwise dodgy schemes to deal with it.
Everyone should be using a password manager. You should NOT use one that is online. That’s just asking for all kinds of badness in your life. There are a number of good ones out there. I would advise using one that is open source like Password Safe, which was originally written by Bruce Schneier, who at least knows a bit about cryptography. (He authored ‘twofish’, which was a finalist to replace DES)
Choose a really good passphrase for your master password, and use generated strings for websites and such. Every site should have a unique and strong password.
Finally, BACK UP YOUR STUFF. Do it daily.
None of this stuff is rocket science.
Even us old Po Folks have enough sense to keep passwords in one or two small wire wound memo note pads. One in the safe deposit box and one somewhere in the house.
***I bet it is: password123***
Reminds me of an old Captain Kangaroo Tom Terrific cartoon from 63 years ago in which an elephant forgot the combination to a strongbox with elephant snacks inside.
Nothing like the keys to the whole kingdom “out there”.
So what happens to the bitcoins when bitcoiner collector, miner, owner, whatever you call them them when they croak?
If they don’t pass the password to their wallet on to their heirs, they are locked up forver.
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