Age of the Geek, Baby.
Alex Hardysun
We were going to run this story tomorrow with the headling “Chasey Lain & Anais Return to Porn!” … But then we’d have to point out that tomorrow happens to be April Fool’s Day, and that would have been really mean to some people out there — even some of them not named Gibby.
That said, it could have eased us into much less interesting, but certainly more important considerations today of the Risque Password Strategy you should consider. Some of you have been having more trouble than usual with stolen passwords lately, and it just causes a slight inconvenience for you when dealing with us. The site fraud protection shuts everything down, and then you just write us and we set up new access for you. Sad for you. Sad for us.
Before we begin, on the off chance that any of you might like to see yet another picture of Anais — and have the increased benefit of seeing her “next to” a previous “universally acknowledged as stunning” Risqué Business client, Chasey Lain — we thought this would be an illustration worthy of some merit at this point. (OK. So it didn’t really take a whole lot of brain power to figure that out.) We really hate to just jump into Geek Stuff without at least some consideration of beautiful women. We could do it, of course, but why?
ANAIS & CHASEY
Spectacular Visual “Aides”
(try to make it down to geek stuff below)
OK. So on to the bit of technical “blah-dee-blah” that you really should read. Out in the Real World, a stolen password can be a real pain in the butt, with potentially devastating ramifications. Without going into all the hows and whys of the people that do this sort of thing, once again we’ll try and just give you the answer in simple terms:
- Pick a password at least seven characters long that includes lower case letters, uppercase letters, and at least one number and "special character" like !@#%^&* … which are just the characters you get when you hold down the shift key and hit one of the numbers at the top of the keyboard.
- PLEASE do not share your usernames or passwords.
There. Now that doesn’t seem too tough, does it? And if you want to know WHY, well, you can read the following chart. If you really don’t care, you can hit your back button on your browser now. We promise that we have no more pictures of beautiful women to show you today.
| Character Set | Password Length – in characters | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | |
| all lowercase letters | 0.5 sec. | 12 sec. | 5.2 min. | 2.2 hours | 2.4 days |
| lowercase letters w/ number(s) | 1.7 sec. | 1 min. | 36.7 min. | 21.7 hours | 32.4 days |
| lowercase letters w/ number(s) & character(s) | 15 sec. | 15 min. | 15.8 hours | 40.5 days | 7 years |
| Upper AND lower case letter(s) w/ number(s), & character(s) | 1.4 min. | 2.1 hours | 8.6 days | 2.2 years | 209 years |
Now we have cited the appropriate source for the data here, and if you really want to read all of the mathematical rationale and much elaborated on conclusions, you can feel perfectly free to read that entire article. For our part we’re just thrilled that people like ol’ Gary exist. Compared to these sorts of discourses, our little Geek Gapes are positively titillating.
Presumably, that stands to reason.
