Anyone wondering about the grep
for balls
results around 11:40, it looks like Spotify uses zxcvbn as a password strength checker, which contains some dictionary lists of common words people put in passwords, in order of how common they are.
Hackers will use this as one main technique for password guessing (as opposed to a simple brute force, like “0000”, “0001”, “0002”, … , “9999”, it will probably be faster if we start with “1234”, “1776”, etc.). When I say ‘dictionary’, I don’t just mean English words; the name of zxcvbn itself is an example of a common pattern, one that people think they’re really smart for choosing and super easy to remember and type, but one hackers will obviously be aware of too, just like turning password
into P455w0rd1!
.
https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn for general info
https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn/tree/master/data has the .txt files
“Criticism” has multiple meanings, and I believe the user you’re replying to is using one of the definitions which means more than just simple disagreement - obviously a downvote is expressing a negative judgement.