Diceware is a system to make passwords that are easy to remember but very difficult to guess. The technique uses dice throws to choose a passphrase.

Diceware was invented and trademarked by A G Reinhold and is available at https://diceware.com. It requires five dice and a table such as the one Reinhold created. For each roll of 5 dice, there are 7776 different possible outcomes. Each combination selects a different short word from a 36 page table.

If I roll 61544, 21455 and 65243, the phrase that the tables return is “track cove yves” This doesn’t have enough entropy to be a good password and diceware.com explains why in more depth and authority than I can.

My idea is that you can use diceware to create usernames. I tend to use the same phrases for a username. If you see those phrases, there’s a good chance it’s me, which isn’t good for anonymity.

I can use two or three rolls and Diceware to construct a username that is unique and won’t be reused anywhere else. Diceware usernames won’t be biased by the difficulty that humans are poor when they try to pick randomly. Google is a nice place to use Diceware to create throwaway user names that google won’t mangle with numbers at the end. [Ignoring the paradox that if I create my usernames this way, it’s still not anonymous because very few people do it this way so it can be a little obvious.]

I just created my account at http://archiveofourown.org. AOOO is an archive for fanfiction of all sorts. I’m hoping to add fan fiction based on Vernor Vinge’s Hugo winning works A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I didn’t find any other AOOO fanfiction for him, so I can do all the world building I want as Blitz72hero. (In addition, it’s a cooler name than I could have come up with on my own!)