John Mattson wrote:
I am constantly amazed at the number of sites which FORBID the use of
special characters in passwords and userid's. And by the sites which
LIMIT the length of passwords and userid's. Since the number of possible
combinations increases exponentially with the possibe values for each
character and the number of characters, I cannot fathom why they impose
such limits. But they do on such financial sites as Vanguard Mutual
Funds, Scottrade, and World Savings. I eMail them regularly and complain,
but I have seen no changes so far. There may be a case for forbidding
certain special characters, and I think that requiring special characters
might be counter productive, but I cannot see any logical reason for
completely forbidding them.
Because they don't exist on ATMs. If you have a debit/credit card tied
to your account and
go to an ATM, you can't enter the special characters (perhaps except #
and *). ATMs also
limit the password lengths, so that the software inside doesn't have to
have more buffer
space than absolutely necessary. That also probably eliminated
upper/lower case differences
as well. Quite possibly folds the letters into the appropriate numbers
as on the phone.
Kim Goldenberg
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