I guess in practice it doesn't really matter much anyway because while my serial doesn't specifically follow the format described in the link it'd still be utte

I guess in practice it doesn't really matter much anyway because while my serial doesn't specifically follow the format described in the link it'd still be utterly trivial to brute force. So that they leak the whole thing onto LAN anyway just turns it into even more of a joke, but I guess would rarely make a real difference. Some of the HN crowd have security monitoring on their own networks that would detect suspicious hammering patterns, have more device isolation, etc, but I strongly suspect the vast, vast majority of PW installs are pure ISP default setting CPE environments. Using crummy default password routers full of their own holes too!