[conspire] Password permutations (was: Correction)

[Nick Moffitt]

On 31Mar2020 04:29am (+0000), paulz at ieee.org wrote:
>  OK, now I'm the one who is math challenged.
> Suppose there are 70 characters (upper case, lower case, numbers, etc)   A 32 character password could have 32^70 or 2E105 possibilities.
> If a password is made of 4 words, and there are 500 words in the dictionary   4^500 = 1E301  possibilities.  English has a lot more than 500 words, but LO calc doesn't handle numbers much larger than that.

I think you have your exponents upside-down.  Think of each word like a "digit" and the number of the words in the dictionary the radix in your "number system".  That would make it 500⁴, not 4⁵⁰⁰.  That's a mere 62,500,000,000