There is no limit on the length of a passphrase,

[Mark H. Wood]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 08:15:13AM -0400, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> Glyph = one symbol in a language.  It could be a single English letter,
> a single Chinese ideogram, or a single Hangul phoneme.  The more glyphs
> in your passphrase, the more entropy you have (usually).  English
> accumulates about 1.5 bits of entropy per glyph.

Nitpick:  a glyph is a specific drawn letterform.  There are many ways
to draw, for example, a "Roman capital A" (serif/sans, upright/slant/italic,
various degrees of boldness or extension, innumerable sizes and many artsy
styles) but they all map to one Unicode code point and one encoding in
e.g. ASCII.  A glyph is a representation of a language symbol, but not
the symbol itself.  All of those variants are members of the class "Roman
capital A".

A passphrase *could* be an image, but usually is a sequence of
character codes.  So, although most readers probably understood
"glyph" in the way I believe it was meant, I think we should be using
some other word.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, pedantic nitwit   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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