How To Spot A Psychopath

It takes some serious stamina for a page that was a Cruel Site of the Day in May, 2002 for the spectacular violence it has perpetrated upon the English language to still be up, and still exactly the same, more than four years later.

That’s, like, a century, in Internet time.

But the Zhejiang Yuyao Jinlida electric appliance company, Limited has achieved this feat.

Respect.

Every now and then, a company comes up with a product name that sounds like an attempt to make a speech synthesiser make a weird noise.

There are plenty of examples, of course, but I’ve noticed over the years that major television manufacturers seem to feel compelled to, at one time or another, give their flagship product line a bizarre name.

Sony kicked it off with the “Kirara Basso” line, which launched in late 1991. I don’t know where they got the name from, but I presume someone got paid big bucks to come up with it. Search for “Kirara” today and you find a manga/anime two-tailed cat (the Wiki entry for that character contains some info on the name).

Not to be outdone, Panasonic came up with the “Gaoo” a couple of years later.

“Gaoo” does actually apparently convey a meaning somewhat analogous to “Picture King” in Japanese, but it’s still a stupid name for a product you intend to sell all over the world. English-speakers can’t even say it without looking as if they’re insulting someone.

And now Hitachi has “Wooo”. They’re very proud of their Wooo World.

Eh. Could be worse.

Today, I have spent quite a while reading the TV Tropes Wiki.

It is informative and hilarious.

Thank you.

I regret to say that no Automatic Teller Machine Machine I have ever used, here in Australia, has given me the option to use the language Hmoob.

“Hmoob” sounded to me less like a language and more like a nonsense password (26 bits!), but it turns out that it’s actually a way of writing “Hmong“.

The reason why you can write “Hmong” that way, though, is quite interesting.

I’m finally shifting my password collection out of my previous ultra-secure unencrypted text file and into KeePass. KeePass is a mature open source password storer which seems quite easy to use, and makes no doghouse-worthy security claims.

Plus, it’s nifty.

Here, KeePass is showing me that a line of identical characters may be a long password, but it’s not a good password.

You get this little dynamically updating bits-of-entropy graph whenever you enter a password - for the KeePass vault itself, or for one of the sites/devices/whatever whose passwords you’re keeping safe in KeePass.

This is a really neat way of illustrating the idea of password complexity. It doesn’t take into account dictionary attacks, though, which in the modern world are not slowed down much by brilliant tricks l1k3 the u5e of 1337-sp34k. If your password is a dictionary word, then even if you obfuscate it with letter-to-number swaps, it’s probably still crackable in minutes, not weeks.

A string of three dictionary words with a few digits on the end, though, is reasonably secure…

…so what KeePass is telling me here (click the image to see the larger-filed original) is fair enough.

To avoid the dictionary word trap, you can either do this sort of thing - a lot of dictionary words in a “passphrase”, or a few words and some numbers - or you can use one of those ludicrous more-or-less genuinely random “T\:;9+jrF:y4+@cf#6″w7z” or “Suy7JOvd” kinds of passwords.

Or you can make up nonsense words. That’s what I often do.

If you’re trying to crack a password and a dictionary lookup won’t help, the length of time it’ll take to guess is directly related to the amount of information entropy the password contains. Information entropy is, in brief, an objective measurement of the amount of information something contains.

“Suy7JOvd” is higly memorable, by the standards of true random passwords, but it has only 48 bits of entropy. It is, therefore, feasibly crackable by brute force on a single modern PC in a usefully short time.

“T\:;9+jrF:y4+@cf#6″w7z”, on the other hand, has 132 bits, which pushes it well into the “cubic kilometres of sci-fi nanotech” category. For all practical intents and purposes, a password like that can’t be brute-forced. The only way you can hope to crack it (as opposed to just steal it from someone who knows it) is by exploiting some weakness in the cryptographic system being used (to hash the password, or to protect the data to which the password allows access).

Which is all very well, but even “Suy7JOvd” is pretty bloody hard to remember. “T\:;9+jrF:y4+@cf#6″w7z” is ridiculous. Everybody knows that people who’re given such passwords just write them down, usually on Post-It notes which they stick to their monitor. Or - if they’re especially devious, and very proud of their intelligence - they stick them to the underside of a desk drawer.

Steel door two feet thick, lock utterly unpickable and unforceable… key hidden under the doormat.

So - nonsense words.

“Slobodongoo” is a 48 bit password, appears in no dictionary, and is quite easy to remember.

“Grobbynolofroidicality” is 85 bits, which is quite enough for pretty much any purpose. And it’s also reasonably memorable, though I recommend you not wander around the office muttering something like that. It’s bad security practice to speak your password aloud, and it may also induce your coworkers to take action.

If you’re determined to go to 128 bit password strength, which is ample for every single purpose on the planet Earth (unless it’s important to you that God not be able to crack your password), then “Seglifromobulgradistalibilitegumentsic” manages it. Inserting capital letters and/or spaces can get the length down - “GorgoBrindyFerguBolishSkuziPlen” and “Mali Colu Snobo Limby Tij WoB” are each 128 bits, too. Punctuation can help a lot - “Eeble frong? Zoiby. Nyoj!” is 128 bits as well.

None of those are, I grant you, particularly easy to remember, but they’re easier than “j3JBRGjxYCllgW2s2xccLZB9ww”.

And you don’t need 128 bits, anyway. 70 or so will do just fine.

“Nerbolica grib” and “Ib? Galoomb!” are both 71.

It’s not very hard to remember a few of these kinds of passwords. Look at all the people who can remember “Supercallifragilisticexpialidocious“, after all. That’s a 112 bit word right there - though it’s probably in lots of password cracking dictionary files, along with several spelling variations, and is therefore not actually very useful. But you get the idea.

Passphrases can be just as good. The only real problem with them is that they’re always significantly longer than an equally secure nonsense word password, since dictionary attacks mean that a “70 bit” passphrase is not actually as secure as a 70 bit nonsense word, unless your nonsense word turns out to actually be a dictionary word in some language you don’t know.

Long passwords also, of course, take longer to type, especially since password boxes that sensibly display asterisks while you’re typing make it impossible to tell if you’ve made a typo until you hit return, get an error, and use some of your profanity allowance.

So go ahead and use passphrases, if you like.

Personally, I’m going to stick with the Flobadob-speak.

Is “where the girls are green and the grass is pretty” better or worse than “When I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun“?

Discuss.

(Yes, I already know that these aren’t actually spoonerisms, they’re just swapped words. If you are a huge nerd, you’re going to have to find something else to nitpick.)

When you work with something every day, you’re likely to end up with at least some strong opinions about it.

I work with words every day, so I have some strong opinions about them.

I don’t think I’m unduly picky about spelling and grammar. A lot of word-workers get very upset about the use of American words in Commonwealth English, or vice versa, for instance. But I frequently mix US English terms into my largely Commonwealth writing, when they make more sense.

“Flashlight”, for example, is just a better word than “torch”. Its meaning is clearer. And “torch” can, of course, continue to be used when someone’s referring to oxy-acetylene or oily-rag-on-a-stick.

I still spell “analog” as “analogue”, but I don’t feel very good about it. It’s stilly silly [dang it - a typo in a post about word-pickiness… now I’m going to hell].

I was happy when most Australian publications finally decided to stop spelling “jail” in the ridiculous English way. The English spelling is like a real life example of the ghoti principle.

(The ludicrous Frenchified “programme” is also dying out in Australia, thank goodness.)

Yes, I’m annoyed by dumb apostrophe placement and have made reference to Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe in the past, but apo’strophe’s in the wrong place hardly ever damage the meaning of a sentence. They just make it a bit harder to read.

The growing plague of dangling modifiers is much more likely to cloud the actual meaning of what people say. As Clive James pointed out in an essay in a magazine which I read because I’m frightfully erudite and, let’s face it, better than most of you, “At the age of five, his father died” is comprehensible once you stop and go back over it again. But if the same mistake lurks in “At the age of eighteen, his father died”, you’re likely to cruise right on through and get entirely the wrong idea.

But I’m not too bothered by that, either.

There are some things, however, up with which I will not put, even if they don’t actually do any harm to the meaning of the sentences where they’re used.

Take, for instance, the word “hobbiest”.

I can accept that people without a strong grasp of the many and varied rules of English word construction could come up with that word when they meant to say “hobbyist”. And it doesn’t blur meaning when it’s used. It’s not as if you’re ever going to be wondering whether the writer actually meant to indicate someone who was hobbier than thou.

But it’s ugly-ugly-ugly and it sticks in my brain and it hurts me. And it’s bloody everywhere (note that it actually only appears in links to Bill Beaty’s quirky and excellent Science Hobbyist site, if you don’t count one comment on his guestbook).

“Hobbiest” is in dire danger of becoming an accepted way to spell the bloody word.

A similar, less common, but to my mind even more horrid word: “Turrent”.

Meaning “turret”.

Found, disturbingly often, on pages where “hobbiest” is also used.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.

And, finally, could the marketer who decided that the term “in store” or, joy of joys, “instore” needed to be included in every second advertisement please step forward?

Thank you so very much. You were right, of course; before your brilliant innovation, there was no way to convey to an audience the information that the product shown in the advertisement was actually available for sale! However did commerce survive, before you came along?

It’s high time you claimed your reward. They’re waiting for you just through there.