I recently had to find out whether a very large text file had any lines where the length (character count) of each line differed, as they needed to be identical. This will help:

cat file.txt | awk '{gsub(/[ \t]+$/,""); print length($0)}' | sort -u

I have read countless articles where people tell you how bad it is to:

• Use dictionary words in combination with symbols - like Helicopter123
• Phrases with dictionary words - like I Like To Eat Spunk
• Dictionary words with letters replaced by symbols - like P@ssw0rd
• Part of your personal details mangled with other characters - like Girls081975
• Not use all of the character classes lower, upper, digits and symbols - like some123
• Using repeats of constructs - like NotMyPassword!NotMyPassword

Their reasonings are:

How do you report an email not working problem to your IT support vendor?

You email them….

Doh!

A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test used to discriminate between humans and computers. It is widely used for registration pages, and wherever a system needs to ensure it is dealing with a user and not a bot. Which is just swell.

If it was not for the fact that some CAPTCHA's are so hard to read that they actually defeat humans too. Look at these examples from Microsoft: