https://xkcd.com/2869

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Why couldn’t the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

    • @[email protected]
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      112 years ago

      This reminds me of national treasure so much. Literally just random jumps until you fall into the obvious answer.

    • JackGreenEarth
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      122 years ago

      I watched all of Futurama, but I don’t remember that episode. Which one was it?

    • Matt/D
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      622 years ago

      Animatronio mentioned a fountain. That’s a statue of Neptune, god of water. The number of points on him trident is three, or trey. The “u” in his name is written like “v”. Trey, “v”. Trevi! It’s the Trevi Fountain. There can be no question!

      • Alue42
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        222 years ago

        “but what about–?”
        “There can be no question!!”

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        This except instead of going directly through that thought process, one character will say, “I’ve got it! Follow me!” And the chapter ends, followed by a chapter from the pov of every other character who isn’t involved in that discovery.

  • This is what it’s like to watch Detective Conan in America. They will even have commercial segways where they say “hey, remember this important clue!” And then not even use that clue in the English dub’s edit. They still present it as a mystery the viewer can solve, but then the solution is always some convoluted BS using clues the audience was never shown lol

    • KptnAutismus
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      22 years ago

      subtitles are slightly more annoying, but i at least partially know what’s going on.

      plus english dubs often times suck balls.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        I’m sure they meant segue here

        segue 1 of 3 imperative verb se·​gue ˈse-(ˌ)gwā ˈsā- 1: proceed to what follows without pause —used as a direction in music 2: perform the music that follows like that which has preceded —used as a direction in music

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Now, I don’t want to be the asshole that shits on a nearly 40 year old classic movie… but why would the Goonies’ map, written in Spanish, rhyme when translated to English? And why would it translate into “Olde English” with a bunch of “ye” this and “ye” that?

    • palordrolap
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      152 years ago

      The dead pirate captain’s name is literally a penis joke. I don’t think anything in that movie is supposed to be legit.

    • @[email protected]
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      562 years ago

      My head cannon is that it’s being interpreted by Mouth who is adding his own artistic flair to the text. So the “ye” this and that are just him playing around with the words.

      • @[email protected]
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        292 years ago

        Him playing around makes sense the first time he’s translating the Spanish in the attic. It makes less sense when he keeps doing it after they’re running for their lives from the Fratelli’s, dodging booby traps and are facing yet another trap that is a full pipe organ made of human bones. And he’s clearly scared when he translates it. But, maybe he just has weird defense mechanisms, I don’t know.

            • @[email protected]
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              52 years ago

              Yeah… memories of me as a preteen pretending to choke in front of my siblings. Still feel a pang of guilt from that one every now and then.

              • @[email protected]
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                52 years ago

                It was “drowning” for me, seeing how long I could float face down and completely limp in the pool. I could go for around a minute. And that’s too long when nobody else is in on the game.

            • snooggums
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              62 years ago

              Well, nobody likes it when the bit finishes prematurely.

    • @[email protected]
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      372 years ago

      Also “ye” in olde English is just pronounced the. It’s wasn’t a y it was used for the letter thorn which made the th sound. They never said ye. So there’s no way the Spanish would translate to fake old english

  • @[email protected]
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    262 years ago

    Why couldn’t the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

    Did she want for only to Biker Bob to find it, but Cop Charlie found it first?

    • stebo
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      62 years ago

      For the second amulet she tried quantum encryption, but Engineer Eve kept interfering with the particles.

  • deweydecibel
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    2 years ago

    The next clue is in the White House!

    (This was a reference for, like, maybe 10 people. 10 awesome people.)

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Yeah. So far they’ve gone way overboard in dumbing down the detective work this season.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I haven’t seen it so I’m not sure if that actual critique of the show or if you’re makinge a pun that Reacher is “reaching” for clues

  • @[email protected]
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    572 years ago

    I remember a book I read in elementary school (in the Cam Jansen series, IIRC) where the main conflict was a mean older brother put a password on the new family computer (a huge deal in the early 90s), and the younger hires the kid detective to find the password. The password is “hot dog”, ultimately determined because the desktop BG was a picture of ketchup and mustard.

    I recall being not super satisfied with that ending.

    • @[email protected]
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      352 years ago

      Password guessing is always like that in popular media too. Oh he loved houses so his pw is obviously “Stallion”

      Uhm no, it was probably zkl+7+:$(89?

      • SuperDuper
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        102 years ago

        Even if the password was “stallion” they probably would have made it Stallion1, Stallion!, $tallion, etc. The password always ends up being a single word, all lowercase, no numbers, no special characters.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Well. Cyber security professionals wish it were that way. Instead it’s usually 1234 or their kid’s birthday or some shit. Having a connection in your mind between houses and horses and then using that to remember something like Green4Stallion8 would actually be more secure than most people’s passwords. It’s even more better if you can remember a nonsense word that phonetically matches and change up the capital like, kreeN4stauLion8.

        Of course most people don’t need to worry about social hacking. Black hats aren’t going through random social media profiles when they have millions of password and email combinations they ripped from a few websites. So unless you’re the CEO of LifeLock or dealing with abusive family the above password would totally work even if everyone around you knew you loved Horse Cottages.

        Just don’t forget to change it in 30 days…

        • greenskye
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          52 years ago

          Ironically only the passwords I’m forced to change frequently (i.e. my work password) are something simple and easy to type. All of my personal passwords are like 40 characters of gibberish my password manager invented and the password to that is similar to the xkcd batteryhorsestaple and is changed from time to time as well.

          But my work doesn’t allow password managers, so I just have a rolling window of like 12 passwords since that’s their history limit.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            Yes, password expiry is generally considered bad practice and should only be triggered on demand if there’s suspicion of a security breach, precisely because it’s much more likely to lead to simple, less secure passwords. And when users change it, they will probably just add a number or something anyway, so it’s not going to stop a determined attacker from finding the new pw regardless.

            Which doesn’t stop a ton of organizations from requiring it anyway.

          • @[email protected]
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            112 years ago

            No. Make sure your password is memorable to you, and long without being easily guessed. The more secure the initial password, the longer you can go without switching. The more memorable the initial password, the longer you can go without using password recovery.

            If your passwords are safety critical, they should not be written anywhere, making remembering them key.

            This assumes you’re not using two factor authentication of course. With 2FA, your password security (not strength, that’s different but very related) is less important. Security requires the vector of attack to be small, so having a bunch of accounts with the same password decreases the security (but not strength) of your password.

            Requiring frequent changes to passwords on average causes less secure and less strong passwords to be used, and causes the lost password recovery to be more frequently used, which is, in and of itself, a vector of vulnerability.

            • @[email protected]
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              52 years ago

              Except nobody is out there guessing passwords. That’s a flawed basis and advice that was outdated a decade ago. They’re pulling them from site breaches and brute forcing dictionary attacks with bot nets. The best thing the average person can do now is a locked file to store their passwords. The password on that is a unique easily memorable thing and everything else can be gobbledygook because you have a reference. And yes unencrypted but locked files aren’t a big block to a hacker in your computer. But the average person isn’t facing that problem.

              And if you’re not an average person then you should be using a physical 2fa device on the principle that even if it’s stolen, they would still need to gain physical access to the computer.

              The one thing you shouldn’t do is use a 24 character hash on every site and leave it for a year because it’s “hard to guess”. It will get breached and decrypted well before then.

          • @[email protected]
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            52 years ago

            The recommendation is every six months. But that’s based on companies faithfully reporting breaches to everyone right away. Which they haven’t been. You could probably leave sites that aren’t hooked to a payment for every six months, but email, bank, and anything that has payment details should be changed more often.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            Since websites decided it was okay to delay reporting breaches as long as possible it’s the new prudent time frame for updating critical passwords. (Things linked to payments methods or sensitive information)

      • JackGreenEarth
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        72 years ago

        I think you meant horses, houses to Stallion seems like a rather tenuous link.

        • Kalkaline
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          92 years ago

          “correct-stallion-battery-staple” is what I think you meant

        • @[email protected]
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          152 years ago

          He loved houses. Houses is one letter off from horses. A stallion is a horse. His password is stallion!

    • @[email protected]
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      512 years ago

      I can imagine you going *"Why didn’t they just hit [Esc] to bypass the password prompt, open a DOS prompt and delete the password files in C:\Windows.pwl?"

      (Yes, that was actually a thing you could do on early 90’s Windows 3.0)

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        Even now if someone has physical access to your Windows computer and it has a USB port, they will get through.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Not if you activated a BIOS password which blocks booting from USB (and can’t be reset by jumpers or removing the CMOS battery on modern motherboards), or Bitlocker which blocks copying cmd.exe over the accessibility options.

      • Tippon
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        152 years ago

        You didn’t even need to do that. You could hold down the shift key to bypass some passwords, and just click cancel on others.

        Early Windows had awful security.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Same with Windows 95 and Windows 98. Those operating systems were not really designed with a proper concept of ‘user accounts’

        The password box wasn’t supposed to prevent system access, it was to capture user credentials for networking, like remote fileshare access.

        Pressing escape is just choosing to continue anonymously.

        • @[email protected]
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          92 years ago

          I believe even as far as XP and maybe 7 you could just make a new user account with admin privileges by creating it through command prompt and changing a single flag. I used this to get unfettered access to the remote hard drive server in high school and stole other people’s homework.

          It’s no wonder I ended up going the GED route lmao

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            Yes, but getting to the cmd, you have to replace C:/windows/system32/utilman.exe with cmd.exe on 7+.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              I believe I wrote all the commands sequentially in a batch file because some well intentioned IT person blocked access to cmd, but had no restrictions for creating/executing .bat

  • kbal
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    2 years ago

    Firefox when I click on the address bar and start by typing ‘m’: Oh, I know! You probably want xkcd.com/2869 — that’s got an ‘m’ in it!

  • @[email protected]
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    182 years ago

    I had one friend who was obsessed with these idiotic “lateral thinking” puzzle books, because she’d read them to us and then pretend like she had figured out the completely ridiculous scenarios from the start.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I had an elementary school teacher who would do these puzzles with our small class.

      It was much better than your situation though: he would already know the solution and basically we took turns asking him yes or no questions until we figured it out.