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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do I get in touch with individuals that have the computational capabilities to find hash collisions for a monetary compensation? I've forgotten the password to a 7-zip archive, and my single 1080 Ti is currently cosplaying as a shop vac under the watchful eye of hashcat, but I doubt it can exhaust the search space alone.

Have you considered renting a GPU instance or two from Amazon Web Sevices?

I would have to use the local equivalent of it due to sanctions, but I think a competent human intermediary should be able to reduce the search space a few orders of magnitude, since I think I used a passphrase for it. I definitely didn't generate a random string as a password.