Entropy in ascii-armored output?

[Chris De Young]

Hi,

Some people have started to suggest that actually writing down passwords, if
they're kept in a secure place, might not be a bad idea; the rationale is that
passwords which can be considered "good" are reaching the point of being
un-memorizable.

Assuming for the moment that this is the case (whether it really is or not isn't
clear, I think), it seems that copying some arbitrary chunk out of the middle of
some GPG encryption output (with -a, e.g. "QhRuM+W4xC9qnPvn") might be a good
source of password material.

It's random-looking to the untrained eye, but how random is it really?  It
occurred to me that the ascii-armoring process might introduce weaknesses that
aren't obvious, but I don't follow the guts of the process well enough to be sure.

Thanks!
-C

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