Write meaningful replies?

freitasm:

 

Write meaningful replies?

 

I do the best I can!

OK, now I'm just piling on ... 😆

Microsoft again ... 4 firewall rules that appear to be exactly the same?

ANglEAUT:

 

OK, now I'm just piling on ... 😆

 

Microsoft again ... 4 firewall rules that appear to be exactly the same?

 

 

But you are now 4 times safer...?

sir1963:

 

But you are now 4 times safer...?

 

Since we're all now using non-deterministic text prediction algorithms for absolutely everything, I run my packets through firewall rules multiple times...

Ok, this may be a bit of pedantry - but we have to create a new password with 1 digit, 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter and 1 special character. That's 4 characters - so how do we reach the 8 minimum?

(This, by the way, is the adult site that was accidentally printed on the Wicked Dolls toys.)

>>must contain 1 digit, etc

Well... if pedantry is OK...
The legal eagles invented the add-on phrase "and no more than one" to make it clear when one is the upper bound as well as the lower bound.
Otherwise you're free to add more.

Anyone know why we're not allowed blanks in passwords ?

NZ Post's Address and Postcode Finder can't cope with macrons (e.g. ā, ē, ī, ō, ū).

Search for e.g. PO Box 100 Whakatane and it will find it no problem.

Search for e.g. PO Box 100 Whakatāne (note the addition of the macron) and the tool just disappears from the page requiring a reload to use it again. Basically the JavaScript version of a crash.

I'd tolerate this from a foreign business operating in a country where their official languages doesn't have macrons etc -- but NZ Post has no excuse. At the very least it should just fall back to finding the non-macron spelling.

KiwiSurfer:

 

I'd tolerate this from a foreign business operating in a country where their official languages doesn't have macrons etc -- but NZ Post has no excuse. At the very least it should just fall back to finding the non-macron spelling.

 

Handling diacritics and unicode is nowhere as simple as "just fall back to finding the non-macron spelling". Modern development languages have more support for this stuff, and there are multi-megabyte libraries (ICU) which can used used to implement this in languages such as C, but it's not practical to use this everywhere and there can be significant performance penalties for doing so.

For a project I worked on a few years back, I stored diacritics in the database but did not display them on the site or in e-mail unless the user enabled that option. They were never enabled for SMS notifications as they increased message size and cost the client more money. That was a low-volume site.

In an earlier project I was involved in, one of the senior developers ended up significantly restructuring the ICU headers to improve performance. I'm not sure what the ongoing implications of that change were. It may have created a maintenance issue, but as-is, it just wasn't performant enough.

So, no, probably not braindead... possibly limited by technology, or a deliberate decision in the interest of a performant system.

KiwiSurfer:

 

NZ Post's Address and Postcode Finder can't cope with macrons (e.g. ā, ē, ī, ō, ū).

 

Search for e.g. PO Box 100 Whakatane and it will find it no problem.

 

Search for e.g. PO Box 100 Whakatāne (note the addition of the macron) and the tool just disappears from the page requiring a reload to use it again. Basically the JavaScript version of a crash.

 

I'd tolerate this from a foreign business operating in a country where their official languages doesn't have macrons etc -- but NZ Post has no excuse. At the very least it should just fall back to finding the non-macron spelling.

 

Story from 2 years ago... "New Zealand Post has moved quickly to fix an IT problem" except they still haven't... NZ Post moves to recognise Māori macrons and new words – Te Ao Māori News

pdh: Anyone know why we're not allowed blanks in passwords ?

Because then the mighty and awful password gods will get offended.

Some guys I know once tried to track down patient zero for the various eye of newt and wing of bat password rules that "federal security standards" mandated and got as far as Windows NT4 SP2 before losing the trail inside Microsoft.  So as far as anyone knows it was an arbitrary set of requirements that a Microsoft intern came up with, which have become folklore "standards".  Their conclusion was that "the rules have been pulled out of thin air, or less well-lit places".

SirHumphreyAppleby: Handling diacritics and unicode is nowhere as simple as "just fall back to finding the non-macron spelling". Modern development languages have more support for this stuff, and there are multi-megabyte libraries (ICU) which can used used to implement this in languages such as C, but it's not practical to use this everywhere and there can be significant performance penalties for doing so.

And for people wondering why ICU is multiple megabytes and also in constant need of updating, there are numerous languages where mappings are nontransitive, for example 'oongarian with it's three cases (upper, lower, and title case) and other weirdness, and that's just for relatively straightforward European languages.  For situations where you've got exact-match lookups and similar it's often just easier to force ASCII than to try and accommodate a minefield of exceptions, even more so when the underlying software doesn't handle it and you need to try and add a mapping layer that doesn't break things on the way through.

Edited to add: The reason I brought up the three cases is that case-insensitive comparisons don't work.  Another example is situations where a single code point represents multiple letters, so dz doesn't match dz.

pdh:Anyone know why we're not allowed blanks in passwords ?

 

Historical issues with CGI scripts on Unix webservers, perhaps?

When it comes to human interface design, as far as I am aware the rule has generally been ‘don’t allow the error to occur in the first place’.  

TwoSeven:

 

When it comes to human interface design, as far as I am aware the rule has generally been ‘don’t allow the error to occur in the first place’.  

 

Yes, because no matter how stupid you might think the error is, someone will make it, "because they can".