By Andrew Somers
So... We've been taught now for years to make our passwords more secure by D0!n97h!n95L!k37h!5 ("doing things like this", i.e. substituting characters with numbers and so forth).
The theory was that by increasing the character set size, password entropy would improve — at the expense of being much harder to read, harder to remember, and harder to type into the hidden void that is the password field. This has long been accepted as "the way".
But does this actually improve password safety? The short answer is "not really".