For everyone who finds this story confusing, I'll try a recap: The password file on UNIX systems from 1969 right up till the 1990s were readable by everyone on

For everyone who finds this story confusing, I'll try a recap: The password file on UNIX systems from 1969 right up till the 1990s were readable by everyone on the system. However, the passwords were one-way encrypted or "hashed". For the password a user typed such as "p/q2-q4!", the password file contained a hash such as "ZghOT0eRm4U9s". It used to be a rite of passage of every aspiring UNIX systems programmer to write a cracking program to discover some of the passwords on their system -- typically by encrypting a dictionary of words to see if any matched up with the hashed values in password file. If everyone picked good passwords, this was futile. But on any large UNIX system, many users selected dictionary words so this attack was often successful. Recently someone unearthed the password file from one of the original systems on which UNIX and C were developed. Naturally it's great fun to discover the original passwords of all the UNIX luminaries such as Ken Thompson (his strong password being a chess move "p/q2-q4!"), Dennis Ritchie (password "dmac" -- anyone know what that might mean?), Brian Kernighan (an easy to type keyboard pattern "/.,/.,"), Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne shell, didn't seem to care and chose obvious password "bourne", and more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21209594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21209594. One lone password from the original list, Bill Joy's password, was still uncracked. Bill Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, author of vi, and a key developer of BSD UNIX. He apparently picked the best password. This latest news says that Bill Joy's password has now been cracked, that it uses a control character in place of a letter, it is otherwise all lowercase letters, and is a chess related term (as Ken Thompson's was also chess related). An an example, his password could be chess-related word "c^Astlng", where the ^A is control-A (but it isn't -- I checked). But the actual password has not been revealed "because of the outpouring of negativity about these disclosures, [the discoverer is] reluctant to post the actual password without [Bill Joy's] consent".