Hearted Youtube comments on Ask Leo! (@askleonotenboom) channel.

  1. In terms of entropy, 4 words (30000^4) is equivalent to about 9 random ASCII characters (95^9.055) while being easier to remember.
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  2. Many podcasts are also complaining about declining ad revenue. Not sure of a better opion, like a subscription or fee.
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  3. I feel that no matter how old you are, all the things you need to do while on a computer, let alone typing emails to friends, is good exercise for your brain and your hand / arm. Also getting to read new things from different website, keeps the old brain cells busy and not atrophied. = ]
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  4. One problem is that you have to memorize the 'random' capitalization rule you decided on. Same with the 'spaces'. Also - choosing 'random' words is hard, same with 'random' schemas for capitalization and spacing. Remember too - you have to type it in, the more complex your schema, the harder that will be to do. I think a lot of people take away that a four-word phrase they think of is going to be hard to figure out, and that's just not the case. Picking random words is pretty hard - even the 'correct horse battery staple' has three of the four as nouns, none of the words at all obscure. And - a new phrase/schema for every password? The capitalization schema either needs to be simple, or you are basically making yourself memorize a (on average) 20 bit number. If you make it too simple, it is easy to automate searches for it, same with throwing in what's going on in the 3 inter-word 'spaces'. Really - this is why we have password vaults, which most people don't use anyways.
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  5. A problem that can happen for a user who strictly avoids OneDrive is that user may not be watching his directory structures carefully enoough when placing a file in a folder, and the file may be placed into a folder within the OneDrive folder. This happened to me, more than once.
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  6. I helped publish a book, the problem was the text was in a format the publisher could not open and it was on 5 1/4 floppy discs lucky I had the software to read it, he gave me a signed copy of his book Treasure Hunting on a Shoestring by Mick Moran.
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  7. Outstanding - I subscribed immediately
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  8. The idea that the sysadmin can be your partner is HUGE! I'm glad you mentioned that one. I used to sysadmin for several small businesses. What they never realized is that that position allows the sysadmin to know an enormous amount about the business. I'd often offer advice. Some would take it - and be pleasantly surprised - and sadly others would not.
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  9. I've been using 32 character passwords for years and without any repeating characters in every password. I figured I may as well giga futureproof my security and I noticed that none of my accounts were ever hacked again.
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  10. One of my main beefs with Windows is its obfuscation of folder names. Two different folders have the same paths. Delightful!
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  11. I create an insane string of characters and DON'T BOTHER to remember them. Practically everything has a "forgot password" function that lets you log in with a text message or something.
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  12. “Long term storage” is a fantasy and there is no such thing. Hard drives as recommended fail easily due to machanical failure even they are not used, not electronically connected! Connection type might be easily phased out too. Software no more compatible too. Forget “long term”.
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  13. There. I ruined it. 🤣
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  14. You're like my favorite teacher ever! Always clear, full explanations, always easy to understand. Really enjoy all your videos!
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  15. It's interesting the steps hackers have taken to brute force a password guess. One method is a rainbow table, an enormous database of hashed words and their source text, which gets compared to a hashed password. To maximize the HP, they use motherboards that support multiple processors, equip them with the fastest multi-core CPUs. Then, they load up every expansion port with the highest performance video card they can get, and use special software to utilize the cpu's on those cards to help with the task.
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  16. While there is often no need to update drivers if you are not having issues with any devices, sometimes driver updates will increase performance. Examples of this are updating video drivers or replacing generic storage drivers, with the proper OEM ones released by the device manufacturer. It's also imprtoant to note, that to the best of my knowedlge there have only ever been two driver update tools which did nothing, although one of these was released under many different names. All the rest do actually search for and install updated drivers. But having said that, driver update tools don't always find the correct driver updates, meaning that sometimes the updated drivers they install are incompitble ones which don't work.
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  17. You are showing stone tablets is that Egyptian scripting do people read that. I am afraid because I could understand like shorthand taking dictation I can scream because I dont know I am African American I am facing that I don't know any African American know that.
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  18. All passwords /phrases break down to (1 and 0) i’ve been told . But i’m not all that savvy i have to write them down . I know that in turn negates the basic security . Getting old s-ks no choice in the matter😢
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  19. wow .. great info .. ty!
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  20. 🎉🎉
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  21. Congrats, and thanks, Leo!
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  22. Just use a password manager and random passwords for each place. Any other suggestion is unserious in 2023. It also protected against phishing and keyloggers.
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  23. Thanks for the explanation. One thing that happened to me was that I bought another laptop for work related stuff. When I activated the OneDrive backup, all the files that I had in my personal laptop began to download in my new laptop and both Document folders were merged. I believe that there's no way to keep both backups separated.
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  24. Another thing to consider is if the hardware necessary to read the data will exist. A floppy disk, tape cassette, DVD-RAM, or flash drive will be useless in 100 years if the technology to read them has vanished. Consider how in an analogous way a Blu-Ray disk is unplayable on a computer that lacks the hardware and software to handle DRM.
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  25.  @askleonotenboom  Hey, I realized my amd fx 6300 cou is going to 80 degrees. That was the cause of the problem... Random black screens when it hits 78 degrees when the pc has nothing to run. Well, it is been 6 years with that CPU, time to change it and I hope and pray that I will be able to change it. Thanks for your time Leo! Have a nice day and life :)
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  26. ads are just like taxes. a lot of important stuff rely on them and someone has to pay them, but we shouldn't cripple ourselves by paying more than legally required
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  27. The fastest and an easy way is to make a Macrium Reflect backup of the drive or folders, then explore the backup image. Make sure to tick "Enable access to restricted folders"
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  28. I buy used and have good experiences because I have lower requirements. Thanks for the video.
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  29. MIcrosoft does push using the Windows Backup which "backs up" to OneDrive. You should keep an offline backup. Users new to OneDrive may not understand that it moves your documents, photos, music, and video folders into the OneDrive folder for syncing. That said, OneDrive can be useful if you understand how it works and use it as it intended
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  30. You're the reason I don't panic. Your videos are well researched and very well explained.
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  31. I like your style Leo! :)
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  32. Support your local library today.
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  33. I felt there was maybe a bit of a jump between odds for five-letter words and calculations using the total number of words in the OED, since they're not all five-letter words.
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  34. Very useful background information, cogently put across, thank you.
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  35. Thanks Leo! I have been struggling with one drive backup and could not find anything explaining this till today. This video was immensely helpful. Could I ask for a favour by requesting you to explain how does one drive work if you have two PCs and one Microsoft account synced to both and what is the best way to do this.
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  36. a simple example , got lot of music on tape , but i no longer have a tape deck , i can still buy one but don t know for how long , 8track tape and vhs or beta are already no longer avalabe , flopy to is no longer avalable , am 47 and i have alredy see lot of tech disapair ,in my life time , and soon will be the cd or dvd , many new machines no longe have optical drive ,and some of my cd from 2003 are no longer readable ,, idi drive are no longer , how long do you give sata ,,, an other 5-10 years ,,
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  37. What this video doesn't seem to address is that the four-word passphrase should contain words with a minimum length of four. Surely "a", "it", "is", "i" are all words and are part of the "30-thousand" word set of most commonly used words in the English language; however, choosing "a it is i" is much weaker than 16 random characters. The point of the video does stand, however, as I'm sure there are more than 30-thousand words of length four or more that are both commonly used and not commonly used. Also throw in a few words from other languages that one may know.
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  38. yes helped me alot with yer videos learned a few things here as well
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  39. Thanks Leo, you have finally given me the awswer to where 4000 of my photos went after I changed the back up settings in my Samsung Gallery aka (OneDrive). I didn't know there was a difference between backup and mirror and I found out the hard way. You're very kind to at least explain what has happened and I thank you.
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  40. Not just an archaic word list. Most people have a personal lexicon of nonsensical words they use regularly. There's also the benefit of being multilingual, thus having even more words to use. By using words that can't appear in a hacker's dictionary, you force them to use a raw bruteforce attack. This is why I don't even have a complexity requirement in the systems I develop, over a certain minimum number of characters. The longer your password, the more rules are lifted. When I did an audit on one of my test systems, I found one user who actually had a password with more than a thousand characters. He types it from memory, says it's nothing but words in PascalCase. He's trilingual and knows slang from two extra languages, so he's definitely safe. That being said, in these systems, we're all nerds, it's not an end user product or an enterprise network or anything, just toys for nerds. Though I would like to see more end user products and enterprise systems adopt this paradigm.
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  41. with the 16 random characters, "random" is the critical part. things like replacing an e with a 3 are not as clever as people think, therefore less secure
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  42. Since the point of random word "phrases" is that they're easy for humans to remember, adding random capitalization would completely defeat the purpose, as you'd just be left with a very long string of binary digits to remember in addition to the four words. Choosing "your own" capitalization scheme, wouldn't make much difference, as there aren't that many different schemes an average person would choose between. The real advantage comes from the fact that most people don't - and never will - use completely random strings of, say, 16 characters. Rather they use words and numbers, maybe in combination with some capitalization scheme and one or two special characters thrown in, as is always recommended even though it increases the security by very little. So the "string of random characters" is really just a phrase of one or two words, and it doesn't take much to realize that a four word phrase beats a one or two word phrase.
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  43. Obnoxious nitpick: At one point, Leo refers to a project that uses AI to interpret cuneiform tablets. Those are made of clay, not stone. But the tablets were often fired, turning them into ceramic pottery. One could argue that pottery (and even glass, which is made from sand, a.k.a. small particles of quartz) is essentially mineral in nature. Synthetic stone. So it amounts to the same thing.
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  44. The more pressing problem for me is that MS now has my files....
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  45. Thank you for this and all the info you provide here and alsewhere. You're the only one I trust and the only tech newsletter to which I subscribe. What I do more than anything else is photo editing. My son would like a gaming pc and I have no clue how to advise him. Any suggestions for either machine would be greatly appreciated in this Mac-free household. Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to provide.
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  46. Thanks!
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  47. Build a NAS, back it up to the cloud, then keep a copy on your local machine. Only way you're losing data? If aliens decide to zap all three at once! 😂
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  48. Blu-ray is your friend.. don't forget to buy two external blue ray drives to survive the obsolescence..
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  49. Subscribed! Thanks!
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  50. Thank you for your thorough overview. Cheers!
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