Mathematically speaking, I believe there's more power in an eight-character password than in a longer one. The tools used for cracking them seem to take longer with 8 characters than they do with more or less.

Read that in a cryptography review somewhere, once upon a time. None of my standard passwords hit that mark, though :(

Ooh, I'm close to that with mine. I've got a 9 character password. Why would it be easier with 8? You would think it would get harder the longer it is, with more possible compinations.

It's a mathematical thing based on the algorithms used to encrypt the passwords. Basically, eight characters gives you the longest time before it starts to repeat itself.

Or something like that. Like I said, it was a while ago that I read the article, and much of it was further over my head than I wanted to reach :D