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by nickweb 1770 days ago
(One word more) relevant XKCD [1].

Also, a generator for the above [2].

[1] https://xkcd.com/936/ [2] https://www.correcthorsebatterystaple.net/

1 comments

Do you think it’s bad that I set my password to correcthorsebatterystaple for all my accounts?
Just checked on haveibeenpwned correcthorsebatterystaple has been seen 130 times.

It seems a lot of people took the xkcd at face value.

When implementing a password strength checker lately I relied mainly on https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn (which is great) but added in a check for correct horse battery staple (and variants). Probably not that important in the big scheme of things but I thought it might get a chuckle and/or some respect if anyone happened to activate that code path.
Do Dropbox not automatically flag ‘correcthorsebatterystaple’ any more?[0]

[0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/08/13/correcthorsebatt...

Or just ran with the joke. Likewise I'm sure somewhere out there is a codebase containing

    int random() {
        return 4; // randomly chosen by roll of a fair dice
    }
That would make a somewhat interesting testing strategy.

In a similar vein, React intentionally calls user-implemented functions which are meant to be pure twice in a row (even though that's technically unnecessary), just to ensure the programmer actually makes the function pure (so the application behaves reproducably in the future).

Haha nice, if ever there was a design decision worthy of the title "glorious bastard", this is it.
> It seems a lot of people

Or some people stopped caring

This.

If a system requires an account/password, and people find ways to bypass or weaken account security, perhaps you shouldn't be using accounts.

In days of yore, "cypherpunk/cypherpunk" or "cypherpunks/cypherpunks" was a common convention. Those are found 140 and 38 times respectively in haveibeenpwned.

Considering many systems went out of their way to prevent / disable such accounts, and the convention fell out of practice, that's notable.

Or just people sharing accounts with random strangers.
Except for your HN account, unfortunately.