Re: Well, there's your problem
> do the crack algorithms look at permutations like this
I don't know, but I seriously doubt it. It's about the exponentially increasing amount of possibilities: You chose a 5x4 grid, but you could as well have chosen a 4x5 one, or a 3x4 (and so on). At some point it becomes impractical to try to find any hidden dictionary words and you just brute force the whole thing.
Some permutations are obvious, "password" can be "PaSsWoRd" or "p455w0rd" (and so on), so it's easy to check for those as just as many new dictionary words, But then there are the less obvious modifications. For instance ROT-13 might be count as obvious, but what about ROT-[my first girlfriend's birthday divided by my car's license plate]? Too many possibilities to check for, so for all intents and purposes it's a totally random string.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
