Comment by __MatrixMan__
3 months ago
We should be displaying hashes in a color scheme determined by the hash (foreground/background colors for each character determined by a hash of the hash, salted by that character's index, adjusted to ensure sufficient contrast).
That way it's much harder to make one hash look like another.
As someone with red/green vision deficiency: if you do this, please don’t forget people like me are unable to distinguish many shades of colours, which would be very disadvantageous here!
It’s not like it would hurt you for there to be supplementary info others can see but you can’t.
I think 9dev was saying that providing only a colorized version might make it unreadable to some people, not merely that they wouldn't benefit from the extra color information.
And it's not like it would hurt the developers to be conscious of their choices.
6 replies →
You could still ignore the colors and just read the characters, like people do now, and you could still use whatever color cues you are sensitive to.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, OpenSSH implemented randomart which gives you a little ascii "picture" of your key to make it easier for humans to validate. I have no idea if your scheme for producing keyart would work but it sounds like it would make a color "barcode".
I have to say the openssh random art has never really helped for me - I see each individual example so infrequently and there's so little detail to remember that it may as well just be a hash for all the memorability it doesn't add
If you ignored the characters and just focused on the background colors, yeah I suppose it would look like a barcode. But the way I envision it, each line on the barcode is a character, so it still copy/pastes into notepad as the original text, but it'll copy/paste into word as colored text with colored background.