The number of bits of information in a password are a function of thealphabet that the password is drawn from and how many characters longit is. The formula is:

nbits = ceil(log2(len(alphabet)) * nchars)

So what does that mean? Let's take the case of 8 character longUnix passwords, and do a table:

Sort of presented in the traditional illustrated format:

; sdig ns ibc.com.au.ns1.ibc.com.au.ns2.ibc.com.au.; dig cname ibc.com.au. @ns1.ibc.com.au.[...];; flags: qr aa; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, [...][...];; ANSWER SECTION:ibc.com.au. IN SOA ns1

Here is a useful safety tip if you are constructing HMAC signatures for structured messages,things that you want to parse later: put a format version number intoeither the key or the message.

If you want messages in the old format to fail signature checks so thatthe rest of your code doesn't have to deal with them, put the versionnumber into the key. Put it into the message if you want your code togracefully deal with several generations of message formats; each willstill verify, but the

This week, we:

• got 9,123 messages from 254 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,076 sessions from 1,364 different IP addresses.
• received 264,864 connections from at least 70,143 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 12 connections being checked at once.

Volume has dropped compared to last week ,including total messages, which surprises me a bit. As we can see inthe per-day table