Slashdot Mirror
Why 'ji32k7au4a83' is a Remarkably Common Password (gizmodo.com)
A seemingly complex set of characters like "ji32k7au4a83" is a very common password among users, it turns out. From a report: This interesting bit of trivia comes from self-described hardware/software engineer Robert Ou, who recently asked his Twitter followers if they could explain why this seemingly random string of numbers has been seen by Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over a hundred times.
Have I Been Pwned is an aggregator that was started by security expert Troy Hunt to help people find out if their email or personal data has shown up in any prominent data breaches. One service it offers is a password search that allows you to check if your password has shown up in any data breaches that are on the radar of the security community. In this case, "ji32k7au4a83" has been seen by HIBP in 141 breaches. Several of Ou's followers quickly figured out the solution to his riddle. The password is coming from the Zhuyin Fuhao system for transliterating Mandarin. The reason it's showing up fairly often in a data breach repository is because "ji32k7au4a83" translates to English as "my password."
Have I Been Pwned is an aggregator that was started by security expert Troy Hunt to help people find out if their email or personal data has shown up in any prominent data breaches. One service it offers is a password search that allows you to check if your password has shown up in any data breaches that are on the radar of the security community. In this case, "ji32k7au4a83" has been seen by HIBP in 141 breaches. Several of Ou's followers quickly figured out the solution to his riddle. The password is coming from the Zhuyin Fuhao system for transliterating Mandarin. The reason it's showing up fairly often in a data breach repository is because "ji32k7au4a83" translates to English as "my password."
The original mandarin translates to english as "my password".
The original mandarin character sequence is coded in the database as "ji32k7au4a83", it is a pidgin transcoding schema. It is related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but I forgot the name of that transliteration above.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Because people usually turn off IME edit for password fields. For one thing, a lot of systems reject exotic characters in passwords. Also, if you need to log in from a system that doesn't have a suitable Chinese IME you're screwed if you need Chinese characters. So they turn off IME edit, select US ANSI keyboard layout, and type the keys they would for an easy-to-remember Chinese phrase. It end up looking like random letters/numbers in English.
Zhu yin fu hao is the Chinese keyboard super-imposed on the ASCII keyboard.
Ji3 is u o = wo3
2k7 is de e = de
Au4 is mo yi 4 = mi4
A83 is mo a 3 = ma3
Wo3 U+6211 is the first person pronoun
De U+7684 is the possessive
Mi4 U+5BC6 means secret
Ma3 U+78BC means number or code
Taken together, "wo de mima" translates to "my password".
The number 3 after a Mandarin word stands for the third tone. The number 4 stands for the fourth tone. The particle de is unstressed. There is no tone on an unstressed word