Why do so many companies and people say that your password has to be so long and complicated, just to have restrictions?

I am in the process of changing some passwords (I have peen pwnd and it’s the password I use for use-less-er sites) and suddenly they say “password may contain a maximum of 15 characters“… I mean, 15 is long but it’s nothing for a password manager.

And then there’s the problem with special characters like äàáâæãåā ñ ī o ė ß ÿ ç just to name a few, or some even won’t let you type a [space] in them. Why is that? Is it bad programming? Or just a symptom of copy-pasta?

  • @MagicShel
    4•10 months ago

    Mainly financial sites, in my experience. I also have problems logging into Mastodon, because if I manually type my user and password I get logged in but if I use Bitwarden or even copy/paste it fails.

    But also every site where you type in the user name and then submit and it takes you to enter the password - I use a lot of custom emails to avoid spam so I may not remember my username for a given site, but Bitwarden won’t recognize it as a login page (much bigger problem on mobile, which is where I do most of my stuff).

    • @[email protected]English
      2•10 months ago

      It’s your browser. You can install JavaScript or a browser extension which disallows the no paste input field. So that you can always paste in.

      The financial institutions that implement that they’re trying to guard against local copy and paste password theft. Any program can have access to the clipboard. So I understand why they do it, and I understand why it’s annoying.

      For financial institutions I highly recommend using something like a Fido 2 key. I’m partial to the yubikey bioseries.