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Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

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Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#61

Post by tsimionescu »

jeroenhd wrote: post #56
McMiniBurger wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but don't password fields only recognize ascii? it seems i just can't type korean to password fields

Most competent websites I know accept general UTF8 characters like emoji perfectly fine. There are a lot of crappier websites that don't even have proper unicode support for usernames or profile descriptions out there, though, so your mileage may vary. As far as I know, there's nothing preventing a password field from containing any valid unicode string. The problem may be IME support or servers stuck in ASCII, but t…

Even surprisingly big names are surprisingly bad at this. Don't know recently, but Hotmail/Outlook used to have a rule of only using letters, numbers, and a handful of symbols, also limiting you to at most 16 characters or something. You couldn't even type a space!

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#62

Post by ourmandave »

So many sites require "at least one uppercase letter" and a "special character" and people use the same password for everything.

I wonder how many passwords have the first letter uppercase because that's easy to remember.

And then a trailing "!" because it's the first one you see.

Not that I would ever do that.

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#63

Post by thaumasiotes »

dhruvrrp wrote: post #57

This reminds me of an intern project in my friends company where they stored all hashes a few hamming distance from the password, so even with typos you would get logged in. Iirc it had a cool demo, but was never used in production.

> they stored all hashes a few hamming distance from the password

This doesn't scale well with password length.

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#64

Post by jeroenhd »

martincmartin wrote: post #35

I just want a phone number input box that will strip dashes for me. Many go to the effort of having an error message pop up that says "no dashes or parentheses allowed." So they went to the effort of writing special case code to notice and handle this ... by giving instructions to the person, instead of the computer.

I was convinced that this already existed in the form of masked inputs, but after trying I realised those are broken in mobile Chromium and utterly unusable in mobile Firefox. As far as native components go, I think most platforms actually have a prebuilt control for this that works pretty well in my experience.

You'll probably need to do more than just strip dashes, though. You also need to strip spaces and parenthesis but keep other characters such as + and ~. Many prebuilt phone number input boxes have trouble with even normal American phone numbers, let alone foreign phone number systems. Even if you're only targeting American customers, you'll probably need to support the phone number format for a visiting foreigner as well.

With something as complex as phone numbers I'd just stick to using standard form validation code (like in the HTML standard) to warn users of explicitly invalid input like letters or most special characters and storing phone numbers as a 20 character random text strings for all other purposes. Phone numbers are like time zones, you'd think they're easy to deal with but they're surprisingly finicky to get right.

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#65

Post by LudwigNagasena »

jpswade wrote: post #43
martincmartin wrote: post #35

I just want a phone number input box that will strip dashes for me. Many go to the effort of having an error message pop up that says "no dashes or parentheses allowed." So they went to the effort of writing special case code to notice and handle this ... by giving instructions to the person, instead of the computer.

There's a school of thought in interface design that you shouldn't change what the user inputs, as it can be a jarring experience for regular users.

What’s jarring is that a field for phone numbers can’t parse dashes and spaces.

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#66

Post by weird-eye-issue »

pawelmurias wrote: post #59
markenqualitaet wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because you are changing the daabase schema to introduce a stupid version field to store "normalized" passwords rather then just doing the check twice on mobile platforms.

Hashing takes a lot of CPU time. And btw you don't even need to change the database schema. You could encode the version in the password field itself. Django does this and it works great

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#68

Post by atoav »

martincmartin wrote: post #35

I just want a phone number input box that will strip dashes for me. Many go to the effort of having an error message pop up that says "no dashes or parentheses allowed." So they went to the effort of writing special case code to notice and handle this ... by giving instructions to the person, instead of the computer.

This is like when on a cli application -h displays a hint that you probably meant --help (or the other way around). If you already know someone wants to display the help, why not just display it?

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#69

Post by johnnyApplePRNG »

Probably a feature, not a bug.

Most mobile keyboards automatically capitalize the first character by default.

With the ephemeral nature of password characters upon entry; it would be easy to miss the capitalization, annoying users.

This one small trick probably prevents millions of people from becoming frustrated with Google every single day.

And I'll bet it only works one way.

If your password was "ABCD", then by my logic "aBCD" should work.

But if your password was "abcd", then "Abcd" should not work.

Re: Gmail password first character is case insensitive on mobile device

#70

Post by CGamesPlay »

It's because early mobile keyboards would default to automatically capitalize the first character at the start of an input, and apparently did this behavior to password fields as well. Facebook has also had this password behavior for at least 10 years.
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