I l

l I

Guess which one is which?

I don’t really care about 1, because it’s usually different, and I can’t be arsed to change the font.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    As a job title: sysadmin

    Loathe.

    Every now and then there crops up the situation where there is no copy/paste from host to host. And when that involves a fucking product key or some shit… Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.

    What would you rather read and type?

    Product key: “I dont fucking know lots of lllllIIIIIIlllIII etc”

    Or…

    Product key: “CqiDNKttsj1NUubpbVJ2VJL9eMEpRvRFMV3hNPRxtUX7SMox5UQjeEZX3DqqHNAfkSE”

    I rest my case.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.

      I’m assuming that this is the point you’re making, but just to clarify:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32

      The most widely used[citation needed] base32 alphabet is defined in RFC 4648 §6 and the earlier RFC 3548 (2003). The scheme was originally designed in 2000 by John Myers for SASL/GSSAPI.[2] It uses an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7. The digits 0, 1 and 8 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O, I and B (thus “2” has a decimal value of 26).

      This is generally considered to be a preferable encoding for things like this.

      • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Yeah… No

        I didn’t mean RFC Base32.

        I meant human-safe alphabets.

        Base58 or Crockford Base32 that intentionally remove I, L, O, and 1 (which is distinct from “base 32”).

        RFC Base32 still hits the exact problem I’m ranting about.

        To be clear the (vanilla) base32 version of the aforementioned string:

        “I dont fucking know lots of lllllIIIIIIlllIII etc”

        Outputs:

        “JEQGI33OOQQGM5LDNNUW4ZZANNXG65ZANRXXI4ZAN5TCA3DMNRWGYSKJJFEUSSLMNRWESSKJEBSXIYY=”

        You can use cyberchef to check for yourself.

        This does not solve the problem.

        I meant what I’d said: base 58.