Highly Visible Password: Difference between revisions

* And then there's folks who think that [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/passwords.html passwords should not be masked by default anyway].

** The first computer hackers, mostly found at MIT in the late 50s / early 60s, believed there shouldn't be passwords at all -- everybody should have access to everybody's files -- yes, even write access! They managed to keep that ideology in place in university computers for a surprisingly long time. Read all about those folks in [[wikipedia:Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution|this book]].

* In one of the more boneheaded examples of this trope, a recent update to a popular VPN program requires the user to enter the password by clicking on a ''huge on-screen keyboard''. With the positions of the keys randomized, to slow you down while you search for where the A key is ''this'' time so that the person sitting next to you has plenty of time to jot down your password. The password itself ''is'' masked, presumably because it makes the joke funnier that way.