Font Sensitive Password



  • A client of our company was having trouble logging into our custom-build client extranet website.

    After finding no errors in the logs, first I asked the client to upgrade from IE6 to IE8.

    However, I was pretty confident that the client was typing the password wrong, so I asked if the user was typing a "1" instead of a "!" in the password, I received the following reply:

    "I up graded but then it didn’t work
    I tried to copy & paste and it worked
    It is font sensitive also"

    I replied, assuring the client that the username and password is not font-sensitive. Then I received the following reply:

    "it has to be i typed in the username and password soooo many times and it did not work but the cut and paste did??? Any idea why? (just for my own intrest)"



  •  I had a clever reply to this post, but I can't post it here because it's in the wrong font.



  • @hellgate said:

    "it has to be i typed in the username and password soooo many times and it did not work but the cut and paste did??? Any idea why? (just for my own intrest)"

    It could be a virus stealing your identity. Best send me your bank details, passwords, etc so I can check no-one's stolen them.



  •  We have an internal (thank goodness) homegrown FoxPro application that actually is font-sensitive. If you try to log in without a particular font installed, it won't work.

     

    Fortunately, the guy who wrote it is supposedly retiring soon, although that means that we're going to end up supporting it. I'm honestly terrified to know how it works since, being the only desktop programmer here, I'm going to be the one to end up fixing / converting the data. :(



  • @Corvidae said:

    We have an internal (thank goodness) homegrown FoxPro application that actually is font-sensitive
    No.  I refuse to accept that such a thing could actually exist.  Your statements shake the very bedrock of my world view.  I demand that you abjure, curse, and detest such statements before the entire forum, or it's the rack for you.



  • The thing to keep in mind is that copy-pasting text into website form fields does not copy the formatting, unless you devote a great lot of Javascript to WYSYWYG.

     He probably mistyped a zero as an O or something.



  • @Arancaytar said:

    The thing to keep in mind is that copy-pasting text into website form fields does not copy the formatting, unless you devote a great lot of Javascript to WYSYWYG.
    Rich-text password boxes are the wave of the future.  Web 3.0, baby!  Of course, if we really added fonts and text decoration to passwords, the most common passwords would still be stuff like 1234 and password, but now they'd be in a bold Comic Sans.



  • @Arancaytar said:

    The thing to keep in mind is that copy-pasting text into website form fields does not copy the formatting, unless you devote a great lot of Javascript to WYSYWYG.

     He probably mistyped a zero as an O or something.

     

    What about hidden Ascii/Unicode-things, like for example the 4 or 5-ways to write newline which are copied, but not rendered by every application?



  • @fire2k said:

    What about hidden Ascii/Unicode-things, like for example the 4 or 5-ways to write newline which are copied, but not rendered by every application?
    ... or zero-width-spaces.



  • Don't laugh, I got locked out of my pc today after a co-shirker had changed my input language to russian by using alt-shift at the login screen. Doesn't tell you it's russian. Can't see it either. Couldn't Google to find out how to change input language. I called support who promptly changed my password. I told them it had to be a russian password but that wasn't on the script. MS should have made it a dropdown or somesuch on the login page instead of hiding it away with "special ninja" keypresses. 



  • He may have one of those keyboards that have multimedia keys instead of ! and other characters so instead of pressing Shift + 1 maybe he has to press Alt or Alt gr + 1 or something like that.

    Or, on some keyboards especially laptops there's a Fn  (function) key,

    Or, he may have chosen another keyboard mapping, like French or whatever by accident - when using Copy Paste the mapping doesn't really matter.

    French keyboard: 

     


     



  • @m a t t said:

    Don't laugh, I got locked out of my pc today after a co-shirker had changed my input language to russian by using alt-shift at the login screen. ... MS should have made it a dropdown or somesuch on the login page instead of hiding it away with "special ninja" keypresses. 
    That doesn't make sense.  Ninjas aren't Russian; they're from Japan.



  • <FONT COLOR="#FF0000">h</FONT><FONT SIZE="+2'><FONT COLOR="#FFDB00">u</FONT></FONT><FONT COLOR="#FFff00">n</FONT><FONT COLOR="#24ff00">t</FONT><FONT COLOR="#00ff00">e</FONT><FONT COLOR="#00ffDB">r</FONT><FONT COLOR="#00ffff">2</FONT>

    Somebody totally needs to make a wysiwyg password field :-)



  • Just make the password box a flash element and let flash send a image of the typed in password to the server, there you can verify against a saved image of when the user chose his password.



  • @stratos said:

    Just make the password box a flash element and let flash send a image of the typed in password to the server, there you can verify against a saved image of when the user chose his password.
    But... but... iPad!



  • @hellgate said:

    it has to be i typed in the username and password soooo many times and it did not work but the cut and paste did?
     

    One possibility I've seen before:

    If he's copy/pasting from MS Word or similar and his password has either a double -, or a single or double quote, Word will replace them with their unicode equivalents: for the double quotes : 8220 (opening) and 8221, for the single quotes: 8216 and 8217, and -- will be replaced by a single 8211.  It also "looks" like a different font when copy/pasting vs typing, because in Word the client sees the pretty quotes but when he types them in he only sees straight quotes "

    You can verify this in your browser - make an HTML file with a single text field, and use javascript to show the charCodeAt of each character in your box. 

    (This behavior happens at least between Word and FF)

    - Al



  • @m a t t said:

    MS should have made it a dropdown or somesuch on the login page instead of hiding it away with "special ninja" keypresses. 

    Alt-shift doesn't appear to do anything at all in my copy of Vista.



  • I remember a story from a German developer who had a password with ß in it (paßwort?). This worked very well, until he came to the US for a project and had to type in his password there.



  • @b_redeker said:

    I remember a story from a German developer who had a password with ß in it (paßwort?). This worked very well, until he came to the US for a project and had to type in his password there.
    Bullshit.  We have the letter 'B' here, we just don't write it so gay.



  • @b_redeker said:

    I remember a story from a German developer who had a password with ß in it (paßwort?). This worked very well, until he came to the US for a project and had to type in his password there.

    Probably because his evil Nazi ass burst into flames the second it came into contact with Glorious Freedom-erica.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Freedom-erica
    What the hell is French-erica?  Is that the name of that prostitute you were stalking?  I thought you slit her throat and dumped her in a dark alley uptown?



  •  @blakeyrat said:

    @m a t t said:
    MS should have made it a dropdown or somesuch on the login page instead of hiding it away with "special ninja" keypresses. 

    Alt-shift doesn't appear to do anything at all in my copy of Vista.

    You need to have alternate keyboard layouts setup first.   Then you can set up different key combos to do fast switching, the default being shift+alt to go to the next in your list of setups.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Alt-shift doesn't appear to do anything at all in my copy of Vista.

    You need to have more than one input language in Regional Settings. Alt-shift-release switches languages, Ctrl-shift-release switches keyboard layouts inside that language, if it has more than one.

    Polish Windows installs US English/qwerty, Polish/qwerty, and Polish/qwertz by default, for example.



  • @bstorer said:

    detest such statements before the entire forum, or it's the rack for you.

    Are we talking 24u or 32u here? Because it makes a difference.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    @bstorer said:

    detest such statements before the entire forum, or it's the rack for you.

    Are we talking 24u or 32u here? Because it makes a difference.

    You misunderstand.  Either he repents or he gets a boob job by force.



  • @bstorer said:

    Either he repents or he gets a boob job of the people.
     

     

    FTFU.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    You need to have more than one input language in Regional Settings. Alt-shift-release switches languages, Ctrl-shift-release switches keyboard layouts inside that language, if it has more than one.
    Speaking of Alt+Shift, any idea why Windows 7 occasionally switches me to US English keyboard, even though I only have Slovenian keyboard installed? Alt+Shift will switch back to Slovenian when this happens, but it won't switch to English (since it's not actually installed).



  • @ender said:

    Speaking of Alt+Shift
     

    Alternatively, you could disable the switch keys altogether.

    That's what I do.



  • @dhromed said:

    Alternatively, you could disable the switch keys altogether.
    I normally did that, but this hasn't prevented Windows 7 from switching to the (non-installed) US English layout every now and then - it did prevent me from switching back though.



  • @ender said:

    @dhromed said:
    Alternatively, you could disable the switch keys altogether.
    I normally did that, but this hasn't prevented Windows 7 from switching to the (non-installed) US English layout every now and then - it did prevent me from switching back though.
    This is what I thought as soon as I read what The Socialist said.

     

    mod: fixed your capitalization -TS



  • @hellgate said:

    A client of our company was having trouble logging into our custom-build client extranet website.

    After finding no errors in the logs, first I asked the client to upgrade from IE6 to IE8.

     

    Upgrade him to Firefox!

     



  •  @ender said:

    @dhromed said:
    Alternatively, you could disable the switch keys altogether.
    I normally did that, but this hasn't prevented Windows 7 from switching to the (non-installed) US English layout every now and then - it did prevent me from switching back though.

    I've had that with XP in the past, but only in a certain corporate environment. I thought that whatever tool the IT department used in the background to update software, also set my keyboard settings to the same as whomever was servicing the machine or something like that.

     As to Copy-Paste. I once had trouble entering my WiFi password on the iPhone. Typing it in the notepad and then using copy-paste did work. I still have no clue why, except that the iPhone has a tendency to start text input fields with a capital, at that time it also did that for the WiFi password entry field, so I first had to switch off the "Shift" key before entering a password not starting with a capital. They seem to have fixed it since.



  • My assumption as to why copy paste worked is because his keyboard only has the Ctrl C and V keys. He keeps trying to press the rest but only copy and paste seems to work (and be pressable). So there.

    Also possible is that he was writing the password on his screen using a permenent marker, and scrolled a bit down so it no longer aligned with the screen, therefore when submitting the password it was wrong.

    And the final possibility is that his keyboard was not plugged in.



  • @Arancaytar said:

    The thing to keep in mind is that copy-pasting text into website form fields does not copy the formatting, unless you devote a great lot of Javascript to WYSYWYG.

     He probably mistyped a zero as an O or something.

     

    As a side note, all correct possibility to the answer of the OP is not permitted in this post.

    Such as: 0 vs O, a leading space, copied content contains non visible characters (ms word tends to insert a whole lota crap into pasted text as we recently found out), oh crap rule violated *commits sipuku*



  • @dhromed said:

    @ender said:

    Speaking of Alt+Shift
     

    Alternatively, you could disable the switch keys altogether.

    That's what I do.

    I wonder what lame excuse Raymond Chen can produce for the brain dead choice of keyboard layout selector shortcut. I find myself frequently switching layout by mistake, seems to be to do with switching to the most recently minimised program with alt-shift-tab -- I do wish minimise wouldn't move the window to the end of the alt-tab sequence. (Minimise is very handy when you use systemwide mouse gestures ;) Seriously, a keyboard shortcut made entirely of modifier keys, and absolutely no way to pick something sensible -- how did that happen? Maybe I really should just turn the shortcut off.

    The most weird experience was when Radmin Viewer started typing "," when I hit "." -- although one of its windows had switched to Russian by mistake, the Russian keyboard layout doesn't have "," where "." is. In the end I had to type the IP address into another program and paste it into Radmin Viewer to force it to accept dots.

    I also find the language bar very distracting in XP -- the language indicator disappears completely when not needed (some windows don't consider it applicable), so the taskbar may reshuffle as the bar length reduces. Also, there's a permanent separator stuck in it that won't go away. I prefer the Mac OS style, as you get a nice little flag in your menu bar -- I have a second keyboard layout available on my old Mac just so that I can have a Union Jack in the menu bar ;-) Also, on a Mac, the layout applies to all programs, so you don't get programs that won't switch layout.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I wonder what lame excuse Raymond Chen can produce for the brain dead choice of keyboard layout selector shortcut.

    You know, he's not personally responsible for every single feature in Windows. In fact, I'm 99.44% sure he only works on Compatibility issues.


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