Standing ovation

I hit Like, but this deserves a "Bravo!" and a golf clap.

it got a chuckle

but certainly not side-splitting... maybe I needed to see his execution.

Surely that's a bit harsh.

The jokes aren't that good, but I wouldn't put anyone to death for telling them.

His execution WOULD be funny to see!

Especially if it really were side-splitting.

You get the cleaver, I'll get my coat.

"what am I missing?"

A sense of humour?

I have one thanks

But I'm not sure what the joke is - double meaning of the word "character"? Is that it?

Another version I've heard

has the drunk as a judge, and the claim being that the drunk threw up all over him on the train. "What'd you do with that drunk who threw up on you?" she asks a while later. "Oh, I gave him thirty days." "Better give him sixty, he shit your pants too."

Honestly, no matter how it's told, it's always struck me as being one of those jokes that's only funny when you're drunk.

XKCD,password strength

http://www.xkcd.com/936/

Longer passwords = better passwords.

Password - this is true

I worked in a place where policy was to change passwords every month. The guys on the helpdesk (next to me) howled one day when a member of staff rang to complain. She'd been working in the firm for six months already, and she'd run out of words.

The trouble with memorable long passwords...

...is when you need ten or twenty different ones.

Using the same password on different systems means that you have to trust each of them not to try it out on the other systems that you use - and they may be not all equally trustworthy.

So, you write them down. And in my case, don't participate in places where you need to create a new account and password, usually - and may not even come that way again. Instead, please welcome guests, and also portable externally authenticated IDs, if you need to protect yourself from spammers.

As for the jokes, humour is very subjective, something that isn't funny to you at all will have your neighbour rolling on the floor or vice versa, but I agree that "I like to fart in lifts - that's wrong on so many levels" is my favourite of the list and it isn't on the list. (Of course, in car park lifts that's the least of what they do.) And Paul Daniels is unfairly penalised. He's making an effort and it isn't bad, at least compared to some of the others - again I say, subjective.

And my favourite joke found in spam is, as far as I remember, "Attract men with large breasts".

"Do you want lager breasts" is second favourite.

I expect some people think those are the wrong way round.

(As the bishop said to the actress.)

Correct horse > incorrect math

Unfortunately, Randall has flawed math in that comic. An ATI Radeon HD 5770 running ighashgpu can check over 3.3 billion NTLM hashes/sec. That's 3.3 million times faster than the rate he assumes in the comic. Instead of 44 bits of entropy being 550 years, 44 bits takes less than an hour and a half on a $99 video card.

(550yrs) x (365 days/yrs) x (24 hrs/day) = 4,818,000hrs at 1,000pwd/sec (Randall's calc)

(4,818,000hrs) / (3,300,000) = 1.46hrs at 3.3B pwd/sec (GPU-cracking reality)

And that is for an attacker that resorts to a brute force attack. If you know the password is based off of words, the entropy drops sharply due to shared word roots and letter combinations.

I'm not even going to calculate the effect of renting time on a multi-GPU monster from Amazon, or throwing a botnet at the task.

If you want to really secure something, you can't just use a password anymore. You use multi-factor authentication.

Plural of dwarf

is Dwarfes.