My husband used the initial letters from a couple of lines from a poem he liked as the master password for his keepass. The above is the password he gave me to open his keepass, but it’s not working. Either he dictated it to me, and I’ve got it wrong, or he changed it and didn’t change my copy of his password. :mad:
If I can identify the poem, I can verify or fix the password. And maybe throw it to Cafe Society to identify other poems he might have used for his password.
Note: if you have an issue with me trying to get into his keepass file, I suggest you read this
Off the top of my head, I can’t place the poem, but perhaps focusing on the Nbr. phrase will prove useful, since it seems to be a complete sentence with fewer possible combinations.
I’m not familiar with Keepass. Did you try it with and without punctuation? With and without capital letters?
I’m going to move this to Cafe Society, partly because it has to do with a literary work and partly so that we can get more eyes on it. Hopefully between the two forums, someone will recognize the poem.
It’s definitely Ozymandius. I think the problem is that you’ve got an extra “o” in there.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ok, I have got to know how you did this. I was starting to think about how to write a python script to parse the punctuation possibilities, but hadn’t even yet figured out where a good website/database of poems was. And you pull this out of nowhere!
I was trying to figure out how the letters actually formed into the poem, so I started writing it out:
L— o— o— m— w—
y— m—
a— d—
N— b— r—
But that said nothing to me, so then I tried
L— o— o— m— w—, y— m—, a— d—
N— b— r—
After I considered and rejected some Shakespeare lines about love, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” just popped out at me. I looked up Ozymandias (which I spelled wrong in my post), and saw that it had to be right.
No real trick, but I do like puzzles (and poetry), so the question fit the way my mind works.
Another post in praise and support for SpoilerVirgin!
Even though that poem and the poet are among my favorites from high school days,
I’m close to certain I would never have hit on the solution you came up with!
As an aside, since we’re in CS now and all, Asimov used something very much like this as the plot of one of his Black Widowers mysteries. It was very important for the guest to figure out the password of a fellow who was now dead, but various clues indicated that the password consisted of 14 letters, from which Henry guessed that it was the initial letters of the lines of a sonnet, and then it was just a matter of guessing what the dead guy’s favorite sonnet was from various other clues.