this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn't become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.
I get annoyed when websites say something like, ´Using a password of this strength will take a a hacker one million years to brute force.´
No, it’ll take a million years to try every combination and permutation of allowed characters. Chances are your password will be tried much sooner than that.
That sounds a little low to me. B and N are right next to each other, so I'd expect them to mash left and right among similar keys a lot of the time. Then again, I think we're expecting some randomness here, not an actual chimp at a typewriter, but that's probably more likely to reproduce longer works than an actual chimp.