This is completely unacceptable from Apple. You CANNOT remove a key from the keyboard that's being used as a password.
Turns out they CAN and they WILL. The character has always been special on all Apple OSes.
Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
31–40 of 237 posts
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#32As a non-English speaker I can really relate to this. I think the real mistake was Apple allowing to enter a non-ASCII password in the first place. E.g. on macOS the password fields have been locked to English character set, and I'm not sure why it changed on iOS.
But why should non-English speaking users be forced to use an ASCII password if the rest of the OS supports their language just fine?
If you remember what was the encodings situation before UTF-8 became the norm... Let's say it was really ugly. E.g. there were at least two popular encodings for Russian Cyrillic letters — CP1251 and KOI8-R, and it was _very_ common for applications getting it wrong. Restricting things like passwords (and ideally even file names) to ASCII this was a practical necessity rather than an inconvenience.
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#33As a non-English speaker I can really relate to this. I think the real mistake was Apple allowing to enter a non-ASCII password in the first place. E.g. on macOS the password fields have been locked to English character set, and I'm not sure why it changed on iOS.
But why should non-English speaking users be forced to use an ASCII password if the rest of the OS supports their language just fine?
To avoid apple inevitably fucking up and breaking things like in this case. The risk to benefit ratio for allowing this is just very poor
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#34after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"? In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone…
Honestly of the big companies sometimes I feel like Apple is the worse offender in i18n questions
Sure they have most of their stuff translated but some rough edges make me feel they do the bare minimum:
- Their ISO keyboard sucks. Sure their overall quality makes it good but of the major brands their Enter key is the most flimsy attempt at it
- Some long standing bugs https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250299816?sortBy=rank (which I had the impressions they were made worse in localized version or at least if you used a non American date format)
- General weirdness with translation missing sometimes
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#35if you remove the hachek, there will be MANY locked out czech users. It's a symbol of national pride!
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#36after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"? In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone…
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I agree with you and don't really get what Apple gets from removing a valid Czech character, but how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users?
The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed and that the keyboard might be the problem), then auto revert to the old keyboard on the next unlock attempt...
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "real mistake" is changing things that used to work.
Well, alphabets change (especially emojis), rules change, etc, so keeping a single subset of stable and known characters is unlikely to be a bad idea :)
Maybe.
But there is already a known pattern on how to handle this which I was taught (before the original iPhone even) in university CS studies:
If the manner of entering credentials has to change,
Then on first entry, offer the old method,
And, because you now (temporarily) have the plaintext credentials, you can now inspect it and test if anything need to change for the future,
And then set a flag, or require user action , or just re-encode, to use the new method as inspection determines.
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#38> Byrne was hoping that the next update, 26.4.1, would introduce a fix for this, but its release this week has not helped. Even if Apple restores the háček in a future update, wouldn't he still need to unlock the iPhone to install it?
afaik you can update your locked iPhone with a Mac or Windows in iTunes... but it will still require a passcode after update, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I agree with you and don't really get what Apple gets from removing a valid Czech character, but how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users? The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed a…
You assume the worst case: every character that could ever have been entered is in use.
Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I agree with you and don't really get what Apple gets from removing a valid Czech character, but how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users? The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed a…
> how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users?
You basically can't ever remove an available character.
That includes emojis if they're allowed in IOS passwords.