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by pseudotrash 1018 days ago
"Cybergibbons" from PentestPartners has done a teardown of W3W in 2021 on twitter. It was very spicy and the takeaway was not that it is just ugly implementation as some here suggest, but flawed by design:

What3Words – The Algorithm https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/what3words-the-algorithm...

Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

1 comments

I can understand overlooking homophones, but plurals was just stupid.

Someone came up with a clever idea, and clearly they had some math/cipher skills. But w3w clearly had no linguists on staff. Even Wordle did a better job filtering their word list.

Though with some of the words being so lengthy and linguistically complex, they would have been better moving to a four word system and assuring simpler words that was better filtered.