Classified as a Munition
If you have a Mac Pro with some GPUs lying around, you may as well crack some passwords with it.
Podcast: Accidental Tech Podcast
Episode: 528: My Favorite Slap in the Face
JOHN: I locked myself out of a locked note. You know, the Apple Notes back before you could use your Apple ID to lock a note, you could put individual passwords on notes. And I had a note that I had put an individual password on that I had forgotten and hadn’t put it in keychain or anything like that.
JOHN: And so I used my dual GPUs to crack it, like brute force. To brute force crack my own password. And guess what? The fans really spun up on my Mac Pro. But I did crack it because it was a short throwaway password or whatever.
MARCO: How long did it take?
JOHN: I don’t know, like five minutes. I did not use a 15 character password. This is an argument for you to do the thing where, I don’t remember when they did that, it was ages ago, where they let you do the thing like, “Do you want to update your thing so your Apple ID and your face can unlock all your notes?” I eventually did that.
JOHN: And that’s just a silly example, but I could have also cracked it on an iPhone. I’m not pretending that I need a big GPU to do this but the same reason people don’t need a sports car because they’re not race car drivers they just like to have one even though you you know you can’t really use it without breaking the law.
JOHN: At least I’m not you know breaking the law with my Mac Pro here or whatever remember those ads when you could couldn’t you couldn’t export the g4 to to communist countries because it was like a restricted export
MARCO: Yeah
JOHN: I think Apple had an ad campaign about that
MARCO: Classified as a munition because it’s too good of a computer