Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Passwords to Babel

Passwords to Babel


Andre Willers
22 Oct 2014
“The Fourteen Passwords of Hercules” Used to be twelve . Hercules insisted on fourteen .
Synopsis:
The existence of passwords leads to chopping-up of meaning until unintelligibility . Passwords decrease intelligibility .
 
Discussion :
1.What happened before :
 
2. Format-templates
Passwords being one of Format-templates functions .
You couldn’t access the information (password) or make sense of it (template coding)  unless you had the formatting hardware .
Clay dongles .

3. These were primary targets for capture by an invading force , or destruction (denial to enemy) by the defenders .
The data survived in baked clay-tablets with Hollerith-type sorting holes , but without the password-masks they are difficult but not impossible to decipher .

4.Passwords chop up information .
This immediately makes the process subject to Optimization as set out in http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2008/04/infinite-probes2.html et al .

5. This means that the Secret of anything with passwords descends fractally
1/3 , 1/9 , 1/27 ,1/81,1/241 …etc
Or  , put it another way :
If the message is finite , then when the password is longer than the message then you have a Tower of Babel effect .

6.Actually , even if password is only 1/3 of message length , things will go haywire .

7. What does it mean ?
Optimal lying .
Reach 6 in small-world network , then stop .
An interesting variation of the Halting Problem
If anybody had any idea of what they were doing , they would give 6 free tries , then easier tries in degrees of difficulty .
Even more interesting :
Number 2’s drive the system to destruction .

8. Passwords :
If passwords proliferate past the 6 degrees , they hamper more than protect .
 
9.The Reductio ad absurdum is when every phonetic letter has a password attached .
Errk ! Been done . anti-virus software. Does more harm than the actual virus .
Roman Catholic Church

Try to get any meaning from that in reasonably finite time .
 
10 .Lesson :
If your site is not too popular , no password .
If popular , add password after 300 000  hits . Or not . The whole password thing has been overdone .

11.Why publish , then password ?
To keep the riff-raff out ?  The riff-raff is your audience .

12. The Tower of Babel .
It is tempting to think that   that the whole shebang collapsed because some clerk dropped the master format-template .
What was his name ? Did he go home to his mud-hut and say “ Today I destroyed the Babel? “

Of course not . but destroyed it was .
Babylonian Golf : a hole in one .

Dreaming on the banks of the Euphrates .

Passwords for the Waters of Babylon .


Andre



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