Manually brute force hacking a cell phone has to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen in anime

HatTrkPatrk said:
If that's the dumbest you've seen in anime you need to see more anime

HatTrkPatrk said:
If that's the dumbest you've seen in anime you need to see more anime

luckyowl10 said:
How else do you expect him to break the password of a basic phone? You can't hack that dumb phone, it's too basic, brute force is the only way...But there are smart ways to brute force by using combinations in a particular order to not try the same code more than once. 3 years to break a damn password is a strench for sure, that's the worst case situation, a few weeks-months s should have been more than enough.

It probably had a 4 digit password, which has 10000 maximum combinations. Considering a failed try gives 30 minutes cooldown, he would need 5000 hours to cover all combinations in the worst case situation. So if tried passwords for 5 hours a day (10 tries per day) it would take maximum 1000 days to cover all combinations, which is almost 3 years.

animeIs4Children said:
Even more if you consider this dude (Aqua) is a 30 something years old DOCTOR that reincarnated lmao 
he was close to 40 at the time...

Character is supposed to be "smart" too.

luckyowl10 said:
How else do you expect him to break the password of a basic phone? You can't hack that dumb phone, it's too basic, brute force is the only way...But there are smart ways to brute force by using combinations in a particular order to not try the same code more than once. 3 years to break a damn password is a strench for sure, that's the worst case situation, a few weeks-months s should have been more than enough.

It probably had a 4 digit password, which has 10000 maximum combinations. Considering a failed try gives 30 minutes cooldown, he would need 5000 hours to cover all combinations in the worst case situation. So if tried passwords for 5 hours a day (10 tries per day) it would take maximum 1000 days to cover all combinations, which is almost 3 years.

luckyowl10 said:
How else do you expect him to break the password of a basic phone? You can't hack that dumb phone, it's too basic, brute force is the only way...But there are smart ways to brute force by using combinations in a particular order to not try the same code more than once. 3 years to break a damn password is a strench for sure, that's the worst case situation, a few weeks-months s should have been more than enough.

It probably had a 4 digit password, which has 10000 maximum combinations. Considering a failed try gives 30 minutes cooldown, he would need 5000 hours to cover all combinations in the worst case situation. So if tried passwords for 5 hours a day (10 tries per day) it would take maximum 1000 days to cover all combinations, which is almost 3 years.

ktg said:
Can we stop assuming stupid things when we actually saw that it was 5 digit and the solution was 45510? And you even failed with the cd, because it was 30 secs and not mins.

If we go with his numbers. 100 half a day, 1000 a months. Assuming he had to go to school or whatever. Everyday doing this for half day, so trying out 100 would be good. It would take 455,1 day Which is a bit longer than a year.
But because you had 10 half a day time in a months (because he tried out 1000 a months), it means he did other stuff too. With that number it's 45.51 months. Which almost 4 years.

Realistically speaking the half a day number is pretty correct the cd would be 3000 sec, which is 500 mins, which is 8.333 hours. Typing it in, taking breaks etc is half a day. So I would say with a even a slow pacing, it could be done in 2 years.

animeIs4Children said:
Even more if you consider this dude (Aqua) is a 30-something years old DOCTOR that reincarnated lmao 
He was close to 40 at the time...

Character is supposed to be "smart" too.

What do you think? 
What would you do?

JuuluGaming said:
Damn, I want my 8 seconds back from reading this thread🫠

HoesEatinDogFood said:
How else would you expect someone to guess the password to someone’s phone with no clues whatsoever?

luckyowl10 said:
How else do you expect him to break the password of a basic phone? You can't hack that dumb phone, it's too basic, brute force is the only way...But there are smart ways to brute force by using combinations in a particular order to not try the same code more than once. 3 years to break a damn password is a strench for sure, that's the worst case situation, a few weeks-months s should have been more than enough.

It probably had a 4 digit password, which has 10000 maximum combinations. Considering a failed try gives 30 minutes cooldown, he would need 5000 hours to cover all combinations in the worst case situation. So if tried passwords for 5 hours a day (10 tries per day) it would take maximum 1000 days to cover all combinations, which is almost 3 years.

kabiskac said:


As someone said, the wear on the keypad would have been a huge problem. So you would take off the keypad and build a circuitry that bruteforces for you using the pads directly. You could attach a camera and write for example a python script with OCR which detects the response of the phone.

There is also the more technical way: you can either solder the EPROM off that contains the data and hope it's not encrypted or you can see if the microcontroller that contains the authentication logic is protected. If it is, then you can look up on the internet whether there are any exploits to get rid of it. Once you have read and write access to the firmware, you can reverse engineer it and modify the call to the part of assembly code that checks the password to always return "valid password".

Confused_100 said:
I don’t know who is defending this. But yeah this is one of the very poorly written scenes.

Is it the stupidest thing in anime history? Nope. Is it one of the stupidest though? Yes.

Edit: As I saw some responses, which don’t make sense and I really want to respond to them.

E.g: It’s written this way to show how desperate he is.

Answer: Then the writer could have made him see a set of numbers not all numbers but let’s say 4 of them (and he doesn’t remember the order) and he just tries all combinations, that would have showed how observant and desperate at the same time he is.

Another e.g: He is just a doctor, he wouldn’t know how to hack.

Answer: He doesn’t need to hack, the scene itself makes zero sense. It has nothing to do with his profession either. He could have just searched for another way to do it better. It’s just a writing problem. There’s no other way to spin/defend it.

kabiskac said:


As someone said, the wear on the keypad would have been a huge problem. So you would take off the keypad and build a circuitry that bruteforces for you using the pads directly. You could attach a camera and write for example a python script with OCR which detects the response of the phone.

There is also the more technical way: you can either solder the EPROM off that contains the data and hope it's not encrypted or you can see if the microcontroller that contains the authentication logic is protected. If it is, then you can look up on the internet whether there are any exploits to get rid of it. Once you have read and write access to the firmware, you can reverse engineer it and modify the call to the part of assembly code that checks the password to always return "valid password".

animeIs4Children said:
Even more if you consider this dude (Aqua) is a 30-something years old DOCTOR that reincarnated lmao 
He was close to 40 at the time...

Character is supposed to be "smart" too.

What do you think? 
What would you do?

SomeNewGuy said:
I feel like people are missing the point here. 
The reason why it was written like this is to convey to the audience just how decicated he really is about getting revenge and how far he is willing to go in order to achieve it. 
While it's true the author could've easily incorporated a "hacking" element here, it wouldn't have had the same impact nor conveyed the same message. 
As the whole point of this scene is to get the viewer/reader to react and realise just how mentally screwed up Aqua has become due to Ai's passing where he wouldn't mind "wasting" 4 years of his life just to break into a phone that may or may not contain useful information, this is messed up, it doesn't make any sense and that's the whole point. 
its not like he spent 10 hours a day entering passcodes, he didnt really waste much time doing this. It was a daily routine for him, like brushing your teeth or cleaning dishes every day.

HyroSan said:

You know what? If Aqua just used the internet first before brute forcing the passcode, this shouldn't be an issue

Really, this is a writing issue

HyroSan said:

You know what? If Aqua just used the internet first before brute forcing the passcode, this shouldn't be an issue

Really, this is a writing issue

Confused_100 said:

You read my calculations, right? Because even then, he wouldn’t have finished it lol

stella555 said:


its not like he spent 10 hours a day entering passcodes, he didnt really waste much time doing this. It was a daily routine for him, like brushing your teeth or cleaning dishes every day.

borderliner said:
Wow, this thread really attracted all the smart people...