Always include special characters

Creating a new account is always fun...

"This Is My Secure Password" <-- Sorry, no spaces allowed.

"ThisIsMySecurePassword" <-- Sorry, Passwords must include a number

"ThisIsMySecurePassword1" <-- Sorry, Passwords must include a special character

"ThisIsMySecurePassword 1" <-- Sorry, no spaces allowed

"ThisIsMySecurePassword%1" <-- Sorry, the % character is not allowed

"ThisIsMySecurePassword_1" <-- Sorry, passwords must be shorter than 16 characters

"Fuck" <-- Sorry, passwords must longer than 6 characters

"Fuck_it" <-- Sorry, passwords can't contain bad language

"Password_1" <-- Accepted.

Are you serious? Are you afraid of an SQL injection or something, and instead of properly sanitizing your queries you disallow characters? Or is your software and database so outdated that you're afraid special characters will break it? Goodbye security

"The password must be 6 to 32 characters long and must contain atleast one uppercase character, one lowercase character, a special character, the md5 hash of your last name, a dried olive branch and the blood of a unicorn."

Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

"Your password must be between 8-20 characters and contain an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a special character and a haiku about your childhood pet."

Working in company where part of team is located in Austria and these morons write evrything in fucking german, method names, comments and even the parameters which are sent to fronted. Like it isn't enough they even use special characters like ß,ü,ä and ö everywhere

Password max length: 12 characters
Additional requirements: exactly 1 special character and exactly 2 numbers.

Just wrote a brute-force attack simulation in c. Going to run it on actual hardware, with an 8-character limit, including alphabet (Upper and lower case), 0-9 and a few special characters and see if it gets done tonight ;)

I'll see you all in about 360 trillion operations.

It was a normal school day. I was at the computer and I needed to print some stuff out. Now this computer is special, it's hooked up onto a different network for students that signed up to use them. How you get to use these computers is by signing up using their forms online.

Unfortunately, for me on that day I needed to print something out and the computer I was working on was not letting me sign in. I called IT real quick and they said I needed to renew my membership. They send me the form, and I quickly fill it out. I hit the submit button and I'm greeted by a single line error written in php.

Someone had forgotten to turn off the debug mode to the server.
Upon examination of the error message, it was a syntax error at line 29 in directory such and such. This directory, i thought to myself, I know where this is. I quickly started my ftp client and was able to find the actual file in the directory that the error mentioned. What I didn't know, was that I'd find a mountain of passwords inside their php files, because they were automating all of the authentications.

Curious as I was, I followed the link database that was in the php file. UfFortunately, someone in IT hadn't thought far enough to make the actual link unseeable. I was greeted by the full database. There was nothing of real value from what I could see. Mostly forms that had been filled out by students.

Not only this, but I was displeased with the bad passwords. These passwords were maybe of 5 characters long, super simple words and a couple number tacked onto the end.

That day, I sent in a ticket to IT and told them about the issue. They quickly remedied it by turning off debug mode on the servers. However, they never did shut down access to the database and the php files...

I ’m kinda jealous of English programmers. How cool must it be to have all the common characters for programming fit onto a single modifier, and to have all special characters for default vim keybindings available with shift. On a hungarian keyboard, braces and square brackets are both AltGr-bound, but parentheses are shift-bound. Oh, and the semicolon is AltGr + the key right above it, so it breaks touch typing.

Why do users find it so hard to understand short and clear error messages that are in place to inform them what's going wrong? Why do they instead waste my time when the message clearly says that the password is too short and hasn't got any special characters? FFS!

Just received a mail from my college that my college's student account password does not contain any special characters and I should change it immediately. Wtf? How did they know that?

Tesco.com, you deep pool of creamy baby shit. I've tried to reset my password three times already. My new password has way more entropy than your mathematically impaired rules command, but apparently using password managers is bad practice. It should be about having at least one special character, not EXACTLY one. I've got lots of uppercase characters, not PRECISELY one.

So, what have We learned in this week (wk25)?

There are two types of websites.
The Website, which allows setting passwords Like "123", and the Website that says that your firstname is too weak and must contain lowercase, uppercase letters, requires three or more Numbers and at least two Special characters.

New password cannot be one of your four previous passwords.
Password must conatin upper and lower case characters, at least two numbers and two special characters
Password cannot contain five or more consecutive letters of username.
Password cannot include any _illegal patterns_.

Locked out of your system? Drive over to HQ and ask the admins to reset your password in person.

"Set your new password.
Please don't use special characters or symbols"
😳

Why the fuck would you allow special characters in your passwords, when some of them are considered "potentially dangerous!" can't even login ffs!

I know i know, its an old story.

but.

FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID PASSWORD REQUIREMENTS

NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS WONT MAKE IT SAFER

FFS. JUST SAY IT HAS TO BE 20 CHARACTERS AND BE DONE WITH IT

Microsoft seriously hates security, first they do enforce an numer, upper and lowercase combined with a special character.
But then they allow no passwords longer than 16 characters....
After that they complain that "FuckMicrosoft!1" is a password they've seen to often, gee thanks for the brute force tips.

To add insult to injury the first displayed "tip" take a look at the attached image.

<<< prank victim today.

Swapped font so it would not display special characters and changed characters in my unit tests here and there...

Took me 40mins with headphones on, before the thought that I'm not at fault occurred...

Once you forget to lock your machine when going lunch..

When you're signing up for an account on a government site not to be named in this rant and they limit your password to 6 alphanumeric characters and no special characters... Smh

@dfox feature idea: code formatting. Either indentation or special characters to demarcate code

Nothing big, but the time I felt the most useful and awesome guy in the world was when I wrote a script creating PDF cover letters from a csv file with contacts names for my gf. A bit of Latex and python, a few hours to make it resilient to special characters, but the look of relief (she would have done it by hand) and admiration in her eyes truly made me feel proud :)

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

Security Horror Story:

A password authenticator which is case-insensitive and all special characters are treated as the same value. As a bonus, all passwords are truncated to 4 characters.

Tl;dr stupid password requirements

Begin quote

Password must not contain any non-alphanumeric characters.

Your Password change was not accepted. Enter your current Password correctly following the rules for New Passwords. Please try again.

Passwords must be between 8 and 12 characters in length and MUST contain each of the following:

At least 1 lower case character (a-z)
At least 1 upper case character (A-Z)
At least 1 numeric digit (0-9)

But, MUST NOT contain:

more than five repeating characters in a row (e.g. 111111356 would not be valid, but 112233445 would be valid)
spaces or other special characters

NOTE: Your new password cannot be the same as any of your 10 previous passwords.

End quote

Are you fucking kidding me? Only (26+26+10)^8 through
(26+26+10)^12 different passwords to go through? It's like the oxygen wasters that built this website give zero fucks about security.

Why? This is the site that manages money and investments. Just allow passwords up to 64 characters, allow any ascii character and just fucking encod the characters to prevent any Injunction.

I know most people will be unable to relate here, but FUCK THE FRENCH PC KEYBOARD LAYOUT

FUCK YOUR STUPID ASS ALT-GR (right alt that acts as modifier while the other alt is used for shortcuts, but can't be combined with ctrl because that would make an alt-gr) THAT GIVES YOU ACCESS TO | ON THE F*IN 6 KEY AND \ ON THE F*IN 8. FUCK YOUR USELESS ASS ² KEY, THAT ONLY WORKS AS A ². NOBODY EVER USED THAT KEY FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPLAINING THAT "you know, I really hate the ² key, it's absolutely useless"

THE MAC LAYOUT IS 100 TIMES BETTER, WITH MORE GLYPHS ACCESSIBLE WITHOUT THAT RETARDED "special characters" MENU. WHOEVER DESIGNED A KEYBOARD THAT REQUIRES PEOPLE TO USE THAT MENU EVER IS THE ONE I'D CALL SPECIAL. NEVER HAVE PEOPLE REFRAINED FROM BUYING A MAC BECAUSE OF THAT LAYOUT, SO START USING THAT LAYOUT INSTEAD OF THAT RETARDED, ANTI-DEV PC LAYOUT...

Here's the French PC keyboard layout, notice how every useful key for devs have been placed to maximize annoyance, minimize typing efficient and accelerate ergonomically related diseases

*Sorry, the password must have only 8 characters and must include a letter, number and a special character*

Fuck you!

Little anecdote from my in-house it:

"Our passwords are safe because we change them every 3 months and they have to contain uppercases, lowercases, numbers and special characters. 6 digit length is enough and can't be hacked."

Please use normalization. Don't store more than is intended in one field and use special characters to separate things. It would make future developers job easy.

So I help out in a development forum for a framework I use at work. I learned a crap ton by seeing questions people ask, then learning to solve them myself. I have really enjoyed being in that forum that past 4 years.

Yet, I see people who cannot seem to reason themselves out of a paper bag at times. I see questions of I cannot run this linux executable because there are parenthesis in the filename. I mean most console interfaces are just tab complete even with special characters. This is for a developer in their 50s that has been coding 30 years. Or I see other programmers asking basic questions that 5 minutes with the docs would solve. Most of the ones that I have issue with seem to have been a part of that community a lot longer than myself.

How do developers survive without problem solving skills to understand the frameworks or tools they use?

I had another conversation with a dev in another forum about using "man" in Linux to figure out how to use something. They said something to the effect: "try learning awk from a manpage". I explained about how "back in the day" we learned EVERYTHING from man pages. That is why they are called "man" pages.

Is the industry flooded with idiots now?

Why is every company so BAD at working with spaces in passwords? Just trying to setup Hulu on my PS4, apparently I forgot my password? No, my password had a space in it. So maybe Hulu's just one of those companies that doesn't allow spaces in passwords? Wait no, I can log in with no problems on my Switch or PC with the space. It's just SPECIFICALLY the PS4 app that doesn't allow spaces. Cool cool cool.

Like, am I missing something? Is there some reason it's harder to hash than other characters? It's just an ASCII character, it's not like I'm copy/pasting in some fringe unicode shit. Some companies straight up ban it. Some like Amazon don't recognize it as a special character, while demanding I use a special character. Why is this so terrible?

So, I just created an account on a premium objective information website. It basically sells access to several articles on laws and general "financial relevant subjects". It is important for my work and they have pretty strict password requirements, with minimum: 18 characters length, 2 HC, 2 LC, 2 special, 2 numbers.

Without thinking twice, openned Keepass and generated a 64 length password, used it, saved it. All's good. They then unlocked my access and... wrong password. I try again... wrong password.

Thinking to myself: "No, it can't be that, maybe I only copied a portion of the password or something, let me check on CopyQ to see what password I actually used."

Nope, the password is indeed correct.

Copy the first 32 characters of the password, try it... it works...

yeah, they limit password length to 32 characters and do not mention it anywhere ... and allow you to use whatever length you want... "Just truncate it, its fine"

The senior developer swore the server was responding with a 500 because I, the co-op, was definitely sending the 'wrong encoding' whenever I post special characters. He said, "I'm only taking your data and putting it straight into the database!!!"

I found out it was breaking because he was converting the JSON payload to a STRING and simplistically separating the keys and values by colons and double quotes. Yuuup. Nothing can go wrong there...

Fucking gnu gettext, fucking .po and .mo files and fuck the fucking poedit. Why in the fucking hell a damn i18n solution used by so many languages doesn't support correctly fucking utf 8 characters in strings inside the code, I mean, WHAT THE FUCK, this is my second day trying to make the fucking Python gettext module to translate the fucking word "está" because I've a fucking big code base programming in Spanish that need to be translated. This is the fucking 2016 and we still have problems with fucking special characters? I mean CMMON

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

My company email:

- It's time for the monthly password change!
<writes the usual passwod>
- The password must be over 50 characters long!
<adds more letters>
- The password must have numbers!
<adds some numbers, though it's getting irritating>
- The password must have special characters!
<wtf?? Adds a pound character>
- The password must have at least 20 different special characters!
<da fuq???>
- The password must be at least 50 characters, only special characters and invisible tab/LF/CR characters and it must be changed daily!
<head explodes>
- Thank you! Now please sign in with your new password for 200 times per day.
<closes the laptop and starts using Remington type writer>

Usually these remainders start popping up during the 1st vacation day. When you return to the office, the account is already locked.

And then you wonder why people have the passwords written on a post-it or as a plain txt file in SkyDrive.

If your site only supports alpha numeric characters in my password. You should tell me that when I reset my password rather than just killing the special characters out of the string and submitting my password like that. I spent 15 minutes trying to log in before I gave up and reset it to something simple.

Also, you should let me use special characters in my password, it's 2017.

So there is the webapp that the national post is using in Hungary. When you want to search a street in the given city you have to wait until the whole fucking list is populated and the street names are filtered afterwards. (I've got it he only wanted one request per street). But if that won't be enough the drop down menu is offset in some resolutions and the console is full of errors.

I can live with that even with the duplicate street name, but how dare you to publish an app with a search function that is unable to work with the special characters of the specific language? It's not even hard to make it work. You just a lazy ass dumbfuck who copy pasted something from stack overflow and didn't make the effort of testing it.

I mean I would probably jump off of a brifge if I would make such a huge mistake.

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

Password guidelines...

Just got an online account for an insurance:
Allowed characters for password are a-z, A-Z, 0-9.
Really?
I tried special characters, maybe they just forgot to mention them. Doesn't work, "Password not valid".

People who use special characters in filenames, or characters that don't match /[a-zA-Z0-9]-_./ Should by law be executed by hanging and public humiliation.

TIFU by showing login data during presentation

I was presenting my school project when my teacher asked if I could show him the source code. I said ofc, just let me login to the FTP server. I completely forgot that it was also shown on the big screen, and a random funny student logged in and tried to replace the index file with a joke file. Of course, he didn't want to make damage, so he made a backup. But this backup caused the problem, because he connected to the FTP through Windows Explorer (wtf?), and when he made a copy of the original file, it was renamed to "Copy of xy", but in a localized version, which contains special characters. Because of these characters, some FTP clients couldn't even connect, others just couldn't interact with the file. No download, no rename, no delete, nothing. After trying out like 8-9 FTP clients, I just remembered that I could rename it in PHP. Well, it got deleted instead of being renamed, but at least it wasn't there anymore. I have spent like half more hour with searching for a backup version on my computer until I found it.

TL;DR: showed FTP credentials during presentation on big screen, random student accessed and renamed a file, special characters in name fucked up the server, luckily I found a backup.

I want to torture very painfully anyone who uses Word to send me content expecting that their exact formatting can just be copy/pasted into any old CMS or web page quickly and easily because the press release is going out NOW and I only got this to you NOW so just quick copy/paste it onto the website and we're good to go, right? You can do that, right?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I CANNOT! AND YOU LEFT TRACK CHANGES ON WHICH CARRIES OVER SPECIAL CHARACTERS THAT I HAVE TO REMOVE BY HAND BECAUSE MICROSOFT HIDES OR HAS REMOVED THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF TRACK CHANGES IN SHARED DOCUMENTS! AND YOU INCLUDED TABLES, WHICH I HAVE TO REBUILD BY HAND OR TURN INTO LISTS! YOU WENT TO UNIVERSITY AND NOBODY EVER TOLD YOU THAT YOU CAN'T PASTE DIRECTLY FROM WORD TO A WEBSITE AND HAVE EVERYTHING LOOK EXACTLY AS IT DID IN WORD? WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF MORON?! IT'S BEEN OVER 30 YEARS SINCE THE WEB WAS INVENTED AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T FIGURED THIS OUT?!

At least I get to bill more time.

When people use so many special characters to decorate their comments that their code looks like Brainfuck code :|

I had to create an account on a website. I used LastPass to generate a strong password. I entered it and got the following message:
"Password must be between 8 and 16 characters and must have special characters (? , ! & #) and numbers"
My password was 20 characters, me annoyed to generate a 16 character password. Filled it in and got the same error. That was it for me.
Who dafuq limits a password to 16 characters, that's fucking nothing. It did not accept all special characters, only the ones that were showed (like 5 or so).
And here comes the worst part...
It's a bank website! I had to create the most most most insecure password in history for it to work.

Must contain 8-18 characters, 1 lower, 1 upper and 1 special character. Cannot be the same as email address.

18? Why fucking 18 characters? That's not any pragmatic limit. What fucking product owner came up with that requirement?

Is there a good technical reason to not allow passwords to contain special characters? My isp does this and I need to know why.

"When you set up the new app instance, can you set an easier password for our account? No special characters or numbers"

Sure. It's not like having a strong password prevented unauthorized access in the first place. BECAUSE YOU GAVE THE FUCKING LOGIN DETAILS TO AN UNAUTHORIZED 3rd PARTY! Which incidentally is why I now have to set up a new app instance...

What's the strangest Assembler or Pseudo-Assembler you've ever encountered?

I wrote a Z-machine (Infocom's virtual text adventure interpreter) and it was quite an interesting interpretation of bytes:
- The first 3 bits of an instruction tell you the opcode category, the rest are the instruction
- The 2nd (and maybe 3rd) byte tell you in 2-Bit chunks the operand types.
- text is encoded in 5-Bit chunks, with special characters for CapsLock that double function as padding (if your text doesn't align with the 3 letters per 2 bytes).
- and of course there are 5 different versions that all work slightly differently (as in CapsLock becomes Shift or "this special character isn't in use anymore")

One of the largest "modern" payment startup/service here in India has a password requirement of "8-15" characters. One Number and one character atleast. Doesnt support special characters. And did I mention it won't allow previous passwords.

Got an app upgrade breaking my login credentials .. login works on corresponding website but no longer on app.

Guess it has to do with either the length (> 30 chars) or some of the special characters in the password...

Great job!

J.P. Stinking Morgan Chase does not allow special characters in passwords.

This is stupid.

The most frustrating part of the "your password must be min. 8 characters long and include a number and a special character" thing is that it does not improve security.

On the contrary.

I wonder how many people in the company have the name of the city they are located in, and the current year in their password...

#newyork18 #beijing2017

Just a couple of things I'm thinking,

Alacritty in my main terminal, but I have a Hyper terminal (secondary, since it's pretty but not as fast) for thoughts.
I'm not even sure if you can call them thoughts. I would say mental diarrhea.
Most of the sentences are ridden with expletives, and very emotional. I attached a picture where you can see that there is
* some special characters, result of me light smashing the keyboard (I say light as in, I'm very angry but not as angry to not appreciate my single computer).
* a final sentence with some really nasty message.
* a lot of gibberish as well, don't use this as a spanish learning tool.

If you're curious about what's causing me grief, it's trying to make jest work with a vue-cli existing project. I encountered a couple of gotchas that ground my gears.

I estimated this bitch ass task to take like 2 hours tops, but I'm like 4 hours on this already, so I'm halfway broken.

Also, another comment:
While seeing the picture of the dutch devrant meetup, I think to myself "man, there's no way I would not feel awkward in that situation.
But then I noticed the beer and was like "oh, that helps".

Has anyone ever tried to send a message to a rep at PNC on their online banking?

-you can't write any 'special characters' in the message. This includes dashes, slashes, and even apostrophes ("don't" is not allowed!) among others. I guess they just pipe the message right into the SQL queries!

-I had to type a long message there, and I was tired and forgot to do my usual CTRL+A/CTRL+C ritual - BIG MISTAKE!! After clicking submit, I get a JS alert() come up saying that my session timed out after 15 minutes of inactivity (writing a large rant to PNC ofc). Back button does not bring up the filled out form to copy from, as like the whole site seems to be on the same URL. There was no way to exit the alert without losing the message. Thankfully I did not close the tab, and I was able to recover and piece together some of the text snippets using $ gcore / $ strings | less.

Overall this has to have been the worst web app I have dealt with for quite a while.

I have a bunch of text files from writing that I did in a copy of DOS software called WordPublisher from 1992. When I open them in TextEdit or Sublime on a Mac, there are a bunch of special characters, some of the readable text, and then more special characters. The software just doesn't exist anywhere in any format now. Anyone know how I can recover the full text from a file like that?

Actual validation message. I will omit the culprit to not shame them:

Your password must be at least eight (8) characters long and contain at least one letter,
one digit and three (3) special characters. No combination of any of the previously mentioned
requirements may be in a repeat success of one (1) or more. Special characters must be
separated by at least two (2) non-special characters, not including numbers. You may not
use more more than one (1) upper-cased and one (1) lower-cased letters in order together. You
may not begin or end your password with an uppercase letter or special character. You may use
no more than eight (8) special characters in your password.

If you need any assistance with this process, please send a message to our support staff.

Message: PASSWD-NG
Your IP Address: 50.202.37.133

QA: This email don't pass validation ( $%^&*&^%$@m.c)
Me: Yes, that's right, where is the problem ?

QA: We allow special characters in email field, so it should be valid, fix it.
Me: "Searching some info about top-level domains"
Me: Look, this is why this email is bad.

QA: So this email is valid ?
Me: No.

QA: Why ?

Me: O_O
QA: O_O

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Often when i see the annoying as hell t debug exceptionless let’s just bomb entirely but blazing fastness of c and c++ I feel like a nettard
I use c# for its immutable strings clean syntax and beautiful class markers that are redundant compared to c++ but ensure you tell after adding 1000 methods and total lack of all special characters to indicate reference and derreference and pretty lambda syntax... sure it’s lib poor but I get shit done goddamn it and can read my own code later
So why do I feel empty inside every time i run a ./configure and make under Linux like I’m missing some secret party where neat things are being done and want to sob like I do now
I am not a dotnettard even though 5.0 is an abomination in the eyes of man and god ! Even though Microsoft cooks up overcomplex framework technologies that make a wonderful language underused and make us all look like idiots that they then abandon into the scrap heap! We can’t help Linux users haven’t discovered how much nicer c# is and decided to implement it on their own and port their horrible undocumented ansi c bullshit can we ???? Oh god I feel
So hollow inside and betrayed ! Curse
You gates curse youuuu! Curse you for metro direct3d xna wpf then false promises of core ! May you have a special place in hell reserved for you and your cheap wallpaper shifting monitor paintings and a pool speaker that playeth not but bee jees and ac dc forever and ever amen !

Speaking of which do any c/c++ ides have anything that even begins to rival intellisense on Linux and don’t use some weird ass build system
Like cmake as their default ?

Oh sweet memories of time a while back when I already wrote this and still wasn’t getting then tail I deserved

Again

Fuck encoding and fuck PHP!!!
I'm programming a little vocab trainer to get used to php and MySQL. From an old VB vocab trainer I had ca. 2000 txt-files with words and converted them to sql-queries with a simple python script. When SELECTING words with special characters they become encoded properly. But if I UPDATE words their encoding is just fucked up... The table is utf-8 encoded all the columns are utf-8 encoded. The php mysqli connection is utf-8 encoded. My HTML header is utf-8... WTF?

This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?

Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.

And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.

Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.

Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.

You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".

The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.

Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.

Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.

Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.

Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.

That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.

In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.

But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.

Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.

How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.

If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.

On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.

On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.

Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.

And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.

What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?

I was in my IDE writing up a new program, but my compiler didn't accept the encoding format of the files. Because I used special characters, it flipped a lot of encodings around. Then I changed my projects master encoding, then all of the source files they all messed up. The all the files were composed of "????????" I went to a backup and they were messed up too. I exploded... Control Z couldn't even be my hero this time.

Apparently Vue.js developers invented their own markup language which is neither HTML nor JavaScript, following their own special convoluted logic, using the most indirect approaches whenever possible and all the characters available on the keyboard {{#@.:;$-}}

Bad framework is bad...

Set — half-flooded city. Despite streets being three feet underwater, and, of course, filled with jellyfish, the city doesn’t seem to care. People go to work as usual. The protagonist is a special agent. His target is to find “the drain” and flush the water from the city. His enemies want to flood the city even more and are hiding “the drain”. Characters are almost silent. For the entire movie, only two lines are heard: “Where is the drain?” and “Jellyfish are everywhere, not just in the sea”. The soundtrack is an endless loop of “As he lost his mind,”, a line from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”. 30% of screen time is gruesome killings, torture and rape. 20% of the remaining time are long jellyfish sceneries. At some point, the protagonist notices the camera and kills the director. After that,

Can anybody explain why in C# when using string.Format("{0:C}", myNumber);
results in a string with special characters used for spacing instead of the normal space character.

This caused a issues in the PDF I was generating and I'm wondering why the special characters.

I did an engineering quiz yesterday as a way of introducing a new database the school recently got access to. You had to sign up for the site.

- Passwords were max 20 characters (which is better than 10, but still, why???)
- You couldn't use special characters, but there was NO INDICATION ANYWHERE THAT THAT WAS THE CASE. It would just silently fail to log in. I had to open the browser console to figure out what wasn't working. FUCK

So... there is a bank. And the website for example is using "https". Alright. But the Login consists your login ID (in the most cases your account number) and a Pin number ( only 5 chars) If i remember pentesting, crunch etc a pin or password with 5 chars (included special characters) is fast hackable or not? Or is it super secure cuz of the "https"?

Laravel is like a spin-off of your favourite TV show, except with unnecessary new characters and a confusing story line. And you can't just put the DVD in and play! Oh no! You need loads of 3rd party stuff, special DVD player and TV just to watch it.

The only reason you watch it, is because its new and people are talking about it. You watch it and think you like it, because it's new and perhaps you're a little bored of the old TV show. But deep inside, you know in your heart the original show was better.

Why can't we all use PHP like we use too? And have the simple file structures we had? index.php was the index page and your folder structure was how YOU wanted it.

I miss those days.

What will be the regex to include all words concatenated with special characters but exclude whitespaces

Transferred wordpress site to new server for a client and it introduces special characters into the text #fun