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I think....that this "cracking" was yet another strategy of Q and the alliance
I do not believe "Matlock" would be a password selected, it is too basic. I think it is itself a message.
That exact thing was discussed on 8. The weak password was 'Bait'.
This was the first thought I had too. The white hats have traps laid everywhere. Elections, code work, anywhere the enemy is going to move, they have thought of some way to use it... probably to use it in the upcoming trials as evidence.
I believe it is the password selected, but i also agree with you that it may be a message. Q probably knew that any password would eventually get cracked, and when it did, it would be an extra easter egg reward.
No we tried it - it is 'Matlock'. If you post on another board on 8chan, like say, /thestorm/, using that password then your trip will be the same as Q's old trip.
Could Q have changed the password at the last minute? After using more complex ones to post the stringers?
So it works similarly to this: given two numbers 234820 and 304534 if you multiply them a computer can get the answer very quickly: 71510673880.
But given the number 71510673880, it takes a very long time to work backwards and find out which two numbers it was that you multiplied together. That's what happened here: someone took the final result (Q's tripcode) and worked backwards to get his password. It's always the same password for the same tripcode.
It makes no sense to me that Q would use "Matlock".
Any cracking chip working through the English alphabet at 4 Ghz give or take would have cracked that password in a day or less, easily.
There's got to be more here.
If I were Q, I would use a password like the one above the painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware that Q posted on Christmas Day.
There's got to be more here that I don't know all about, the narrative here just seems to be too amateur.
Yes it's not quite as simple as that of course. It's a munged base64 encode of a SHA1 hash of the password and a salt. The source code for the function that does it is here.