you joke... But this works really well (when combined with other good things)
A few years ago I participated in @CrackMeIfYouCan contest, and didn't get a huge number of "easy" hashes because I didn't have the right language dictionary.
Given that most password leaks are hashes, as long as you have special characters like this and your hash size is some length that hashcat likes to not support for brute forcing... You're golden.
@kajer @MegaMichelle @jupiter @CrackMeIfYouCan though careful not to lock yourself out because a keyboard bug stops you entering the characters... https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/04/12/apple-update-turns-czech-mate-for-locked-out-iphone-user/5219671
@falken @MegaMichelle @jupiter @CrackMeIfYouCan
Imagine a stupid keyboard update removes a password character and you have no way to re-create it.
@falken @kajer @MegaMichelle @jupiter @CrackMeIfYouCan about 15 years ago, I set up an Apple TimeCapsule for my wife. Guess what happened: The password chosen to connect didn’t work - and hours later I found out why: There was an umlaut, ä, in her password. Replaced the umlaut by ae - and everything was fine…
Aug 11, 2026, 7:20 PM@falken In some Android keyboards it's ridiculously hard to type a $ character. Don't ask me how I noticed.
I totally agree with that. There was a time where I used machines with both Danish and American keyboard layouts on a daily basis. So I learned to pick passwords consisting of only characters that were located in the same place on both keyboards.
And that was a time when only ASCII was supported, so I had to keep that in mind as well.
The best way to make passwords stronger is to make them longer rather than using more different characters.
I am so annoyed by sites that get this wrong. First they reject my 32 character password because it’s too long. So I try truncating my password to 12, 16, or 20 characters (whatever they permit), and then they reject it because I only have alphanumeric characters. Seriously, the password I started with was stronger than such a short password could ever be. So the weakness of the password I am trying is entirely caused by their low limit on password length and not by the set of characters I had chosen to use.
A user should be allowed to use a password consisting of only two distinct characters as long as it’s long enough and doesn’t have any patterns.
@kasperd @MegaMichelle @CrackMeIfYouCan @kajer @jupiter at one point Linux boot-time FS decrypt wouldn't use the O/S locale, but en-US, so here in en-GB things like @ in pass phrases were... Interesting...
Imagine how the German and the French would deal with that.
@kasperd @MegaMichelle @CrackMeIfYouCan @kajer @jupiter keep two different keyboards on your desk?
@falken @kasperd @MegaMichelle @CrackMeIfYouCan @kajer @jupiter actually no.
LUKS saves #Keycodes, not actual letters & Symbols!