Dial 00000000 To Blow Up the World 306
Charliemopps writes "For 20 years the password for the U.S. nuclear arsenal was '00000000.' Kennedy instituted a security system on all nuclear warheads to prevent them from being armed by someone unauthorized. It was called PAL, and promised to secure the entire US arsenal around the world. Unfortunately for Kennedy (and I guess, the whole world) U.S. military leadership was more concerned about delaying a launch than securing Armageddon. They technically obeyed the order but then set the password to 8 Zeros, or '00000000'."
Nowhere near as safe. (Score:3, Informative)
Mashing the same button can happen because something has fallen on that button.
Or a cat has walked on the console.
Or you fell asleep.
Or a short pulse is generated by a shorting circuit making a 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ... which gets to a count of 8 of them. BOOM!
Or another code is needed and has a zero and you forgot the count of zeros.
Even 12345678 would be SAFER because the chance of that randomly happening is really really low.
Re:Illusion shattered (Score:0, Informative)
bank card PINs are usually 4-digits
Grammar nazi wants to say that that should be "4 digits". If you would instead say "it has a 4-digit pin", then you would use the dash.
Re:Illusion shattered (Score:4, Informative)
00000000 is just as random as any other code. My grandfather used to play 1-2-3-4-5-6 in the lottery, and when someone would point out that that number would never come up, he'd gleefully educate that person on probability.
A pity that those numbers never came; then he and thousands of other "I understand probability" blowhards might have actually learned something. The object in the lottery is not just to pick the winning numbers, but also to share the jackpot with as few others as possible. 1-2-3-4-5-6 is, in fact, the worst possible choice.
Re: Illusion shattered (Score:2, Informative)
Punctuation Nazi wants to say that that is a hyphen. Even on systems supporting various typographical dashes (slashdot doesn't), a hyphen would be used for "4-digit" or "four-digit".
But you are right in that no hyphen or dash should have been used by the GP.
Not only... (Score:5, Informative)
Not only a dupe, but old, old news. This has been publicly and widely known for nearly a decade [slashdot.org].
Re:Illusion shattered (Score:4, Informative)
"The remarkable draw on 14 November 1995 when 133 tickets shared the £16 million jackpot prize is a clear example of the effects the team had deduced.
The winning numbers were 7, 17, 23, 32, 38, 42 and 48, all of which lie in central columns of the ticket, and the players won only £120,000 each. The average number of jackpot winners is five and the average amount won is £2 million."
This illustrates the difference picking common combinations can make. Once a presenter told you how much you'd win if you did the 1-2-3-4-5-6 thing: only a few thousand! (While only a small minority have this 'clever' thought, it's enough to elevate the number of entries with 1-2-3-4-5-6 to significantly more than a typical combination.)
Re:Illusion shattered (Score:4, Informative)
The EMV (ISO/IEC 7816-3) standard allows for a change PIN function that will take a 6 digit PIN. Some banks around the world operate with a 6-digit PIN.
Re:Not only... (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, it's the flat-out truth. You're just repeating what's become urban legend since the story first broke a decade ago.
Have you ever actually read National Security Action Memorandum 160 [jfklibrary.org]? (As referenced in the article.) It only applies to weapons released to NATO, not to weapons in US custody. There not one shred of evidence that JFK, or any other US President, ever mandated their use on US based missiles. (Oddly enough though, the Titan II had a use-control system that was active throughout it's service life.) The whole story that they were so mandated rests solely on an undocumented claim [archive.org] that Robert McNamara "saw to" the installation of the PAL systems. (It remains unclear to this day when, and by who, the systems actually were mandated.)