31–36 of 36 posts
The fake reason is to assist password generators.
The real reason is to make it easier to name and shame the sites with the most ridiculous password policies.
I want to insert the "first time?" meme here. Bad password fields like this are everywhere. Some of my favorites: 1. The ones that don't tell you what the restrictions are at all, just that your password is "wrong". 2. Tells you that a special character is required but doesn't tell you which ones are valid and which ones aren't. 3. Password requirements as stated do not match how the password field validates the pass…
The problem with this form in particular was that I got my password manager to type the password for me. So it wasn't immediately obvious where the error was. If you actually typed the password you would see it go red at some point, but for me it just turned red with a seemingly okay password.
That's a very common pattern. Special characters are usually allowed only from a predefined list. I don't see how this is specifically bad or deserves a blog post.
As for the blog post it was just a way for me to get some frustration off my chest. It's also posted in the "Scraps" section of my site, which I just use for short one-off things like this. If I then decide to write an article about it later (like a longer thing about password managers and dealing with passwords online) then I could link to these scraps.
For the hundredth time, at least, I hereby ask The Web to standardize a meta tag that programmatically describes a site's acceptable password policy. The fake reason is to assist password generators. The real reason is to make it easier to name and shame the sites with the most ridiculous password policies.
Dumb clickbait headline. Sure it’s a dumb form but it’s hardly the first or terribly uncommon to have a limited set of expected special characters. And maybe jaded but my first assumption is that was a set, not an example. Finance sites, utilities, I think the treasury all have something similar. Maybe this person is super young and doesn’t have to interact with crusty online services.
And I wish I was super young, but I just live in a place where institutions like that all use a common system tied to your bank which is actually pretty solid. So the times I have to deal with crummy online services it's stuff like this.
Dumb clickbait headline. Sure it’s a dumb form but it’s hardly the first or terribly uncommon to have a limited set of expected special characters. And maybe jaded but my first assumption is that was a set, not an example. Finance sites, utilities, I think the treasury all have something similar. Maybe this person is super young and doesn’t have to interact with crusty online services.
Not sure why you think it's clickbait? They have messed up password form validation. Sure it's not the worst, not even the worst I've come across. But it's still bad. And I wish I was super young, but I just live in a place where institutions like that all use a common system tied to your bank which is actually pretty solid. So the times I have to deal with crummy online services it's stuff like this.
“ So initially it failed on no special characters in my input. Oh well, easy fix, open up the settings, add the special characters group, and regenerate. Hmm, still no special characters?”
Not sure why you assume there is a standard definition of “special character”. There isn’t. I’m surprised it took you this long to stumble upon this if you use a password manager, but there you have it.
There’s also a lot of words of build up when the first picture with the angle bracket makes it abundantly clear what must be going on.