alt Hacker NewsSurely someone who has been here as long as you have understands that this type of behavior is not compatible with the guidelines.
> Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.
You could have just corrected them and not goaded them into further revealing their ignorance. Yes, they underestimated how difficult it is to crack 3DES. You could have simply told them that.
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zxcvasd • yesterday at 7:46 PM
this is a very common pattern in tptacek's comments, but it's not worth calling out as he absolutely refuses to recognize it, always falling back to a similar response you see here.
with a quick google of "3des broken" and reading the first paragraph of wikipedia on 3des, i was able to guess (correctly!) what they original commenter was referring to.
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I have no idea who they are or what they were talking about. I think they're thinking about 3DES used as a password hash. I never in 100 years would have guessed that's where they were coming from.
The thread that ensued, a discussion of what it means for a cipher to be obsoleted or unsafe versus "broken", is an actually-interesting question.
I feel pretty OK about how this went.