5 ms·
Microsoft doesn't allow passwords greater than 16 characters in length
- revx 14y agoAllow me to be the first to say, "WTF?"
- CrazedGeek 14y ago(for users with Microsoft Accounts) Granted, that'll probably be the majority. Anyone know if non-MS accounts have this limitation? EDIT: Nope, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389204 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389204
- jjcm 14y agoHeadline is inaccurate. Seems to only be a restriction on live accounts, not windows 8. If you use a non-live account to log in, there isn't this restriction. I just changed mine to a 24 character password with no issues, but I'm using a domain account. That said, major portions of what's new Windows 8 require a windows live account to use (the app store, most of the metro apps, etc).
- Splognosticus 14y agoIt seems to me like a lot of ostensibly technically-literate people are installing Windows 8 and not realizing that it's asking them to create a Live account instead of a Windows account. Is the option to create a normal account difficult to find or something?
- jjcm 14y agoI think it's more that the live account creation is front and center during the install process. It's pretty integral to the functionality of Windows 8 as well. While my login is my domain login, I use my live account for much of the Win8 functionality.
- rlu 14y agoLike others have said it is pretty central. With that said, it isn't very difficult to create a local account. I believe there is a button which takes you to a non-live account set up page, though there is an "are you sure? live accounts will really make your experience better blablabla etc." screen which you need to also click a button on. So it's a 2 step flow.
- mc32 14y agoThere's a link right under the live account login/creation "Create a non-Microsoft account". It's on the same account creation screen.
- vacri 14y agoIs a Microsoft Live account needed to use Windows 8? If so, that's a far bigger WTF than a 16-char password.
- missing_cipher 14y agoNo, it isn't required, but they encourage it.
- wideroots 14y agoIf I remember correctly, most of Modern UI apps won't be accessible without a Microsoft account.
- joenathan 14y agoWell you can't get into the store without a Live account, and Modern UI apps can't be installed from outside the store.
- illuminate 14y agoYou can sideload them.
- illuminate 14y agoApps that require Live services require a Live account I imagine, but nothing else seems to have.
- guelo 14y agoIt's the trend started by Android and then followed by iOS and also begun on OSX. It's not quite required but you're pretty much going to want a cloud account.
- codeka 14y agoThe thing I hate is when people make excuses for it. Especially when those people purport to represent the company that made the mistake: > Besides, 16 character long password can have 2.8 nonillion possible combinations. You are more likely to reuse your passwords and got owned through that than password brute forcing. That's a terrible excuse for a 16-character limit. Just admit it was a bad decision (probably made a long time ago) and move on.
- MichaelGG 14y agoI had a short email conversation with someone on the Live team. His stance was pretty much what you said: Somewhere, someone screwed up, and now it's sorta ingrained, and since 16 characters allows decent passwords, it's not a high priority to fix. The stupid part is this[1]: Passwords cannot contain spaces or "non-English" characters. 1: http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/cc540536.aspx http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/cc540536.aspx Edit: The double stupid here is the fact that non-ASCII is referred to as "non-English". I'm pretty sure e.g. résumé is a correct English spelling.
- laserDinosaur 14y agoI don't like the fact that it broke all my KeePass passwords...
- rbanffy 14y agoI find it particularly insulting when a web application tells me my family name has "invalid" characters.
- tedunangst 14y agoWhen asked to say the letters of the English alphabet, I have never heard someone include é.
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- jfoutz 14y ago
- runjake 14y agoIs everyone else seeing banner ads in the Metro apps included with Windows 8 RTM?
- astrodust 14y agoIs this the XBox dashboard experience brought to the desktop? That's pretty weak.
- astangl 14y ago"16 characters ought to be enough for anybody."
- taylorbuley 14y agoIt sounds like an improvement on Microsoft's standard NTLM encryption, which supports only up to 14 characters
- lrei 14y agoSome programmer decided to filter characters and limit the length of a string. Honestly, it's reasonable. I know it's not the point but 16 ASCII chars can be used to create a secure windows password. And people with passwords bigger than 16 chars are a corner case. HN has had top stories telling programmers not to care about corner cases or to assign a very low priority to them. In my opinion: "Nothing to see here, move along".
- adgar 14y ago> HN has had top stories telling programmers not to care about corner cases or to assign a very low priority to them. That's because HN focuses on startups. Startups have extremely little time, money and resources. Microsoft has over 94,000 headcount. Microsoft has extremely different expectations from startups. In fact, knowing just about anything about Microsoft's decades of history, you'd know just how much attention they pay to corner cases when it comes to backwards compatibility. Another example: do startups spend much time preparing support for 50 different languages, including RTL, before a product release? Should Microsoft? Advice you see on HN doesn't represent anything more than the current hip advice for startups. Certainly not how a multibillion dollar international corporation should design products.
- lrei 14y agoGood point. But Apple is a multibillion dollar international corporation (more billions than MS) and they still famously cut corner cases. If you go into every corner case, you'll never ship and I don't really think it's that practical/easy to keep adding people to a project to fix every corner case. There's been more than one situation in which they ignored more than just corner cases in backwards compatibility: Windows Mobile -> WP7 -> WP8 and Internet Explorer come to mind. I don't know many examples but that might be because the only MS product I've actually owned in recent times was an XBox 360 (which went RRoD 2 yrs ago). Also strictly speaking this isn't about backward compatibility, from the comments I've read here, you can still have the same windows password you had before. The password restrictions only apply to their online service (Live account or whatever they are calling it).
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- adolph 14y agoDoes this mean Microsoft stores the plain text of Live passwords instead of hashes?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]