I think I’m confused on your point.

I interpreted your statement to mean “adding a requirement for certain types of characters will decrease the number of possible passwords compared to no requirements at all”, which is false. Even in your example above, with only two letters, no numbers / special characters allowed, requiring a capital letter decreases the possibilities back to the original 676 possible passwords - not less.

Perhaps you’re trying to say that passwords should all require certain complexity, but without broadcasting the password requirements publicly? I suppose that’s a valid point, but I don’t think the tradeoff of time required to make that secure is worth the literal .000001% (I think I did the math right) improvement in security.

At one point, Charles Schwab allowed a password of infinite length, but SILENTLY TRUNCATED ALL PASSWORDS TO 8 DIGITS.

This is something I sent a few angry emails about wherever I could find an opportunity.

Provably false. That’s only true if the rules specify some really wacky requirements which I haven’t seen anywhere except in that one game about making a password.

Think about it this way. If you have a password of maximum length two which only accepts lowercase letters, you have 26 choices for the first character & 26 for the next. Each of the 26 characters in the first spot can be combined with any of the 26 characters in the second spot, so 26 * 26 = 676 possible passwords.

By adding uppercase letters (for a total of 52 characters to choose from), you get 52 * 52 = 2704 possible passwords. It increases significantly if you increase the length beyond two or can have more than just upper & lowercase letters.

Computers have gotten so efficient at generating & validating passwords that you can try tens of thousands of passwords in a minute, exhausting every possible two-letter password in seconds starting with aa and ending with ZZ.

The only way you would decrease the number of possible passwords is if you specified that the character in a particular spot had to be uppercase, but I’ve never seen a password picker say “your fourth character must be a lowercase letter”.

I agree - I do use passphrases in some critical cases which I don’t want to store in a password manager.

However, I believe passphrases are theoretically more susceptible to sophisticated dictionary type attacks, but you can easily mitigate it by using some less-common 1337speak character replacements.

Highly recommend a password manager though - it’s much easier to remember one or two complex master keyring passwords & the random generated passwords will easily satisfy any application’s complexity requirements.

I bet they do.

I’ve learned that the best way to get printers to work universally is to buy a printer with ipp support & force a static IP / DHCP reservation. Seems to universally work with every OS I use in my home with no bloaty drivers.

I’ve had some pretty great experience with my Brother multifunction printer / scanner on my Ubuntu server, but never played with Arch.

Best part about Brother’s scanner driver is that it literally just runs a shell script you can modify. I have it set up such that I can scan to PDF from the printer & it will programmatically drop it into my samba share, despite the fact that my printer is not expensive enough to come with the “scan to nas” feature in firmware.