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’m not sure what I’ve done differently, but my under screen reader on my 6 pro is more reliable than the back reader on my pixel 3.

Obviously my one data point doesn’t negate the vast swathes of people who do have issues, but for me I may not even elect to use face unlock. Seems unnecessarily insecure.

In statistics, everything is based off probability / likelihood - even binary yes or no decisions. For example, you might say “this predictive algorithm must be at least 95% statistically confident of an answer, else you default to unknown or another safe answer”.

What this likely means is only 26% of the answers were confident enough to say “yes” (because falsely accusing somebody of cheating is much worse than giving the benefit of the doubt) and were correct.

There is likely a large portion of answers which could have been predicted correctly if the company was willing to chance more false positives (potentially getting studings mistakenly expelled).