Yet, if your Gawker password had been "passwords delight entropy enthusiasts", it would have been cracked immediately, due to the 8-character truncation. "i<3tu

Yet, if your Gawker password had been "passwords delight entropy enthusiasts", it would have been cracked immediately, due to the 8-character truncation. "i<3turtles" would probably have been much safer. Unfortunately, users rarely know anything about the systems used for authentication, so any advice should keep poor systems in mind. That's why I frontload my passwords with a few characters of high entropy before appending a longer high entropy (but memorable) phrase.