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Animorphs did it first
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
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I think that Dan Brown book about computers also had something like a password that was immune to brute force, that ended up being a single digit password. (it was immune to brute force because the password had plot armor).
i mean the programming has to suck but i like places that let you use emoji in your password
like who really is going to make their password "👉password👈"
or "🧙". it's obviously a fake wizard, got no beard.
It probably isn't an issue if you're doing things properly. Your hashing algorithm shouldn't care if the character is latin, Chinese, Arabic, or emoji. It's just a number at the end of the day.
It shouldn't, but you will get issues of how to convert to number.
I made a password protected zip on my Android phone with a few non-ASCII characters, and the password was not accepted on PC. I am 99% sure they botched the encoding, like using UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 or something
But you should normalize the unicode before hashing, otherwise a user having the single letter ä in their password, can't log in when the ä gets built out of a and ̈on their current device or the other way around.
Digital Fortress! I don't think it had plot armour (I'll spoiler tag it as it was the very end of the book):
spoiler
The password was to stop malware (that was leaking all their secrets in real time) and every wrong guess sped up the process. Also their brute force machine was the thing that was caught by the malware in the first place so maybe they were extra cautious and wanted to try and solve the riddle?It's been like twenty years since I read the book though so maybe I'm misremembering. Cool story though (or at least my younger self thought so), taught me about how the NSA can read your messages years before Snowden.
It's been decades for me too, the way I remember it is that the password just didn't work unless you knew you were typing the right one.
It was also the first time I heard of the NSA (I'm not American) - and then later I saw it mentioned on the Simpsons too in an episode where they were hiding in bushes listening to people. I was really surprised by people's reaction to Snowden because I thought it was just common knowledge.