Whose bright idea was this stupid feature?

[jasong]

The shortest communication ever was achieved by two men many, many years ago. One dude wanted to know how their jointly owned company was doing, so he sent a telegram:

?

The response:

!

This leads me to my question. What is the point of forcing people to put stuff in the message body when one sends a PM?

I understand that Xyzzy probably has no control over this feature, so this is simply an OCD rant.

[Xyzzy]

.

[Mr. P-1]

Originally Posted by jasong

The shortest communication ever was achieved by two men many, many years ago. One dude wanted to know how their jointly owned company was doing, so he sent a telegram:

I heard the same story about a correspondance between Victor Hugo and his publisher over how well hs book "Les Miserables" was doing.

[hhh]

I always wonder why when I enter a password, it shows up as ******, instead of being readable. This leads me not to pick things like $%&"! in the password, cause I never know if I get them right on a different languages keyboard.

In linux, once it even didn't show up at all. Hence every newbie in the pool room was desperate.

Only once I saw an intelligent design of a login feature: a small box you could check to get the *****, or to turn them of, don*t know anymore.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by hhh

I always wonder why when I enter a password, it shows up as ******, instead of being readable. This leads me not to pick things like $%&"! in the password, cause I never know if I get them right on a different languages keyboard.

In linux, once it even didn't show up at all. Hence every newbie in the pool room was desperate.

Only once I saw an intelligent design of a login feature: a small box you could check to get the *****, or to turn them of, don*t know anymore.

To stop by-standers from reading your password off the screen.


Pau

[hhh]

Originally Posted by xilman

To stop by-standers from reading your password off the screen.


Pau

Ok, very funny. How often do you read mersenneforum with curious readers standing by? And care?

H.

[Spherical Cow]

Reminds one of the groaner blonde joke...she and a co-worker need to get on the boss's computer. "But it's password protected," one dismays.

"That's OK," the other replies. "I saw him type it in one day. It's really easy to remember: just five asterisks."

Norm

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by hhh

I always wonder why when I enter a password, it shows up as ******, instead of being readable.

I just use all-asterisks for my passwords - that way I am guaranteed to get what I see. "Ah!" You say - "but since you're only hitting one key, it would make it trivial for a would-be over-the-shoulder password-snoop to see what you're doing!" Not so - I have my keyboard customized so when I hit the secret "go into password mode" hotkey combination, every key except <enter> is aliased to *, so I can enter a random key combo, I just need to remember the length of the password in question. It's all very sneaky and devious, and I'm going to have to ask you all to forget you ever heard about it. "About what?", you say. "Exactly," I reply.

[bsquared]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

I just use all-asterisks for my passwords ...

For some reason this reminded me of an anecdote of Richard Feynmann's, when he was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project (from the book, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynmann" - which I highly recommend).

He was a notorious safecracker, and so was asked to open a large safe for which the combo or key had been lost/forgotten. He tried and tried and eventually failed, so they called up a professional safecracker with a large drill. Before he started drilling, the pro decided to fiddle with the combo lock, and within a few seconds, opened it! Feynmann was awestruck, and demanded to know the technique. So the guy revealed, "well, this particular model of safe always comes from the factory with a pre-set combination, so I just tried it out". And it was guarding nuclear secrets!

[Xyzzy]

http://www.bash.org/?244321

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by jasong

This leads me to my question. What is the point of forcing people to put stuff in the message body when one sends a PM?

I ran across this for the first time yesterday ... I was able to enter ONLY a smiley, though