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I wish they wouldn't do that with the naming. It's confusing as hell to call it a PIN (Personal Identification Number) if it's actually a password.

Well... it would also be confusing to call them "passwords" because they are not that.

  In addition to biometric authentication, Windows Hello supports authentication with a PIN. By default, Windows requires a PIN to consist of four digits, but can be configured to permit more complex PINs. However, a PIN is not a simpler password. While passwords are transmitted to domain controllers, PINs are not. They are tied to one device, and if compromised, only one device is affected. Backed by a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip, Windows uses PINs to create strong asymmetric key pairs. As such, the authentication token transmitted to the server is harder to crack. In addition, whereas weak passwords may be broken via rainbow tables, TPM causes the much-simpler Windows PINs to be resilient to brute-force attacks.[139]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#System_security

So you see, Microsoft needs a way to describe an access code that isn't a password, because it's more secure than that, but yet it isn't exactly a number, so what do you call it? "PIN" is perhaps an unfair recycling of an in-use term, but should they coin a neologism instead? Would that be less confusing?


Secret Code Word.

Communicates it is meant to be secret, and can be a short memorable thing.


It's getting there. There have been a lot of developments in WebAssembly in the past few years. I've felt the same pain so I just released a library to make it easier to run it in Java

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393000


That's were it came from but it's perfectly able to run in environments that don't have anything to do with the web.


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