Comment by lofties

2 days ago

I'm a big fan of "should not include profanity, words of a vulgar nature". It's not unthinkable my password manager comes up with a chain of letters that at one point will include "fuck".

> I'm a big fan of "should not include profanity, words of a vulgar nature".

On my first Wireguard testbed, WG's keygen dropped one at the front of the key. It remains my most treasured digital possession.

This comment reminded me of a talk I saw[1] about Apple's password generation algorithm. Apparently (and unsurprisingly), they have a list of offensive terms the system is designed to avoid. I expect this is common-enough practice in most popular password managers, but probably not all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dwX2kf6Oc

Word list based passphrases mostly avoid this, by not including those words. Which still doesn't mean you won't get something offensive, of course, it'll just be a string of four words instead of four letters.

It kinda is good personal policy IMO for passwords you have to type to be positive affirmations. I used 'Fuckthis1!' for a moment; funny enough it was not the most moralizing thing to type all the time! OTOH, 'H@ppyH@ppyJoyJoy!!' was always a small mood lift.