Chris, you're absolutely right, use of the full set of possible characters is very important, hence the use of & etc. If you click on the link above you will see that the time taken increases dramatically. Small passwords of just lower case letters and numbers could be cracked very quickly.
There is a chance that a complex password could be found straight away, but this is so remote that even government agencies simply wouldn't bother. Don't forget also that it is one thing for a computer to come up with 10,000 guesses a second, but a program like Truecrypt would accept only so many guesses in a time period (say, one every two seconds) so unless you link many thousands of computers together or use a supercomputer the times quoted would be greatly increased. Agencies such as the FBI do open Truecrypt files, but only by gaining the password by more conventional means.
There is a chance that a complex password could be found straight away, but this is so remote that even government agencies simply wouldn't bother. Don't forget also that it is one thing for a computer to come up with 10,000 guesses a second, but a program like Truecrypt would accept only so many guesses in a time period (say, one every two seconds) so unless you link many thousands of computers together or use a supercomputer the times quoted would be greatly increased. Agencies such as the FBI do open Truecrypt files, but only by gaining the password by more conventional means.
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