What is this I don't even

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

And here I thought nothing could top this...

...I just found this gem on the page where I order my lunch coupons.

"Change password: The system can't distinguish between the letters I, L and the number 1, and the letter O and the number 0. You may not use these symbols."

...what?
...what???
...WHAT??????

Comments

[taleya.livejournal.com]

...............WUT

That reeks of manual psw changes done by a monkey.

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I thought.

It's quite common for outsourcing companies to just throw manpower at a problem they don't have the skills to solve programmatically*, and if that means lots of people sat at desks with reams of printouts from one system on one side and text entry screen on the other ... then that's what happens.

Yeah, yeah, I know, [[citation needed]]

This is one of the many reasons why I thought it was INSANE for the last company for whom I worked to have their help desk system hosted by the outsourcing company off shore. That thing could have been (and quite probably was) hosted on a 486 under someone's desk as far as they knew.

* GNU Aspell does not think this is a word

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Citation provided. I was part of a team which did precisely this.

For Computer Sciences Corporation.

Every day was an adventure in head-asplodey.

[hel]

....so "The System" is a person with low vision and virtually illiterate?

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Or a really old typewriter. (Some of those only had one letter for those symbols.)

[tanetris.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure this translates to "We're tired of people writing down their passwords, misreading them later, and bitching when it doesn't work."

Alternative explanation: Someone's having a big laugh at the (sadly few) people who will read that message and actually understand how utterly nonsensical a claim it is.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

My most likely translation is: "We're tired of mailing passwords to people who are unable to copy/paste, change the font in their default mail client, or doing any kind of logical deduction."

But still.

;)

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

What the fuck? Are they using OCR as part of the logon process? You scribble your pword on a piece of paper and scan it in?

[jjjiii]

Sounds like they're using really old typewriters as terminals. A lot of old manual typewriters had "shared" 0|O and l|1 keys.

But that's just stupid. And impossible.

What it probably is, is that the system designers anticipated that people would write down their passwords, and didn't want to allow them to confuse themselves by using ambiguous characters.

I used to have this very problem back in the day when I'd write down my save state password for various NES games. I had to learn pretty early on that unless I used special notation and looked carefully when recording my password, I could lose many hours of progress.

[tattooofhername.livejournal.com]

Guess nobody thinks to strike their 0s any more.

[mirar.livejournal.com]

I miss that.

I used to confuse my math teachers with that. :)

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I still do (most of the time), and get weird looks for it

[teiru.livejournal.com]

Thanks to my Networking/Hardware teacher, I strike my 0s, 7s AND 5s. This has been so ingrained in me due to his constant cries of 'DOCUMENT EVERYTHING' (I am grateful for this teaching, it has saved me lots of trouble) that I even do it at my lowly coffee service job when marking the times on the pots. I get tons of confused looks.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

"Y0u may not use these sym0Is."

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

Sorry, UserName Olio101, you're gonna have to use something else.

[lunatic59.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, you've used indistiguishable characters in your post and I cannot read it. Could you please repost in Morse or Semaphore?

That's fairly clever stuff.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

It's a U.S. Army-ism. Back in the 1960's, when my father was in charge of a teletype operation in a "police action", teletypes had a keyboard that had no lower-case letters, and some had no separate 1 and 0 keys - they weren't data entry keyboards, but tele-type keyboards.

For his unit and mission, inputting a wrong password or passphrase in a transmission cost a significant amount of money, compromised operational security, and could even cause entire sets of codebooks to have to be invalidated and replaced, at significant cost, or for a set of operational security authentication exchanges to have to be made, at significant time and cost.

Oftentimes, non-technical officers were able to have their own private access to the teletype system in order to "better secure" their communications (read: they were using the TTY to run betting pools / arrange for furloughs / whatever) and had the ability to order TTY operators to set the officer's passwords to whatever the officer damned well pleased.

Oftentimes these kinds of things would be accomplished through writing out - or typing out on some ancient typewriter the officer had hauled around through his entire career - a set of orders for the officer's personal functionary.

No matter how many birds or clusters or stars were on the lapel of an officer, however, they absolutely cannot order a machine to over-ride its' own limitations.

Thus, the operational commandment that the system cannot distinguish between the letters I, L, and the number 1, and 0 and O, and you may not use these symbols in your password.

[mirar.livejournal.com]

My password conformer (http://www.mirar.org/password.pike?typewriter=on) now supports removing those characters from the password.