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Why didn't phone have Q and Z? Everyone is mentioning that they did not have them, but I can't find a reason for that.
[1] my grandfather explained it this way back in the early '80s. I couldn't find a good link to a more official source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find that scary. I think it's a testament to the original architects and to the people who maintain it.
I'm not sure about that. Sabre is an extremely (assumption) functional tool in an extremely niche market. That makes the barrier to enter it very high, and the barrier to rewrite equally so. Underneath the covers it could be a real piece hung together by duct tape and vacuum tubes, but why rewrite it if it's working and keeping planes in the air?
If they were OK with applying more duct tape, why not map Q and Z to characters (eg. A and B) that can be part of passwords? (eg. a password of "quiz" would become "auib") It would make their password system slightly weaker perhaps, since freq(a) then becomes more like freq(a)+freq(q) and freq(b) more like freq(b)+freq(z). I'm not sure that's much weaker than just excluding Q and Z, though. The user experience is imp…
Or you map them to something like: Q = ABDHCJSKJDHSSS Z = YYYDUHUHUHSSYS ... to avoid weakening the password.
Why didn't phone have Q and Z? Everyone is mentioning that they did not have them, but I can't find a reason for that.
it was the simplest way to map 3 letters to each number 1-9 on the keypad.[1] that way you didn't have a few numbers with 4 letters and had a consistent model. [1] my grandfather explained it this way back in the early '80s. I couldn't find a good link to a more official source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find that scary. I think it's a testament to the original architects and to the people who maintain it.
It's 2014. Passwords need to be treated as a serious matter. Legacy system or not, there is no good reason to reduce keyspace. As others have mentioned, this is a sign that passwords are being made compatible with old phones without these letters available... and likely the passwords being reduced to numbers before storage. The prohibition of special characters also seems to corroborate this. Furthermore, the poster…
Actually this kind of gives me an idea: what if modern systems decided to just tell people they can't use "p" so that people stop using the word "password" or variants as their password. Hell, for that matter, tell users they can't use vowels so they can't make words. They might do leet speak, or whatever which is pretty easy to crack given time, but it stops things like password re-use attacks (people less likely to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I can't stand passwords sent as part of a welcome email, this does not actually mean that they store the passwords in plaintext. Often, companies will send the username and password as part of a welcome email upon the user registering (and the above screenshots look exactly like that). This does not preclude the company from then hashing the password and storing it hashed. That said, it still is a terrible prac…
Oh yeah. It's impossible to know who has your plaintext password on the backend (even steam who RSA encrypts your pw with a public key before sending), but this certainly is a bad practice and certainly makes it look like they do not have robust security practices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was the simplest way to map 3 letters to each number 1-9 on the keypad.[1] that way you didn't have a few numbers with 4 letters and had a consistent model. [1] my grandfather explained it this way back in the early '80s. I couldn't find a good link to a more official source.
Except that 3 * 9 = 27, and there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. They are actually mapped to the numbers 2-9, which leaves the question of why they didn't use 1.