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it's bad when your password is text instead of dots right?

H

heyadol

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 21, 2004
43
0
coastal
when i logged in (from sleep mode) to os x (10.3.4) today, dots appeared as i typed my password. when i pressed enter the little beachball started spinning and my password turned to the actual text for all the world (or in this case my roommate) to see. it stayed that until i pressed enter again, then it immediately logged me on. so anyway, i'm thinking this is bad. it hasn't happened again but i was wondering if anyone else has had this happen or has heard of this happening. could it be i've got my first mac virus? :confused:
 
There was someone else who posted this problem a while ago, but nobody knew what to think of it because the problem never came up until then. If you can alert Apple of this problem, that would be great. I'm sure they'd like to know about this. Its rare, but I wouldn't want that happening to me. :cool:
 
I've only heard of this one other time... a journalist doing a review of OS X said he had the same experience, but couldn't find any other OS X users who had experienced it. Maybe you should do an archive and install of OS X if this is a problem for your security.
 
That's weird. I've never seen or heard of this. Did you, by and chance, had Jaguar on your Mac and do an Upgrade to Panther, rather then an A&I?
 
Abstract said:
There was someone else who posted this problem a while ago, but nobody knew what to think of it because the problem never came up until then. If you can alert Apple of this problem, that would be great. I'm sure they'd like to know about this. Its rare, but I wouldn't want that happening to me. :cool:
Click to expand...
yah , I remember that earlier post too. So its indeed a bug then.
 
yellow said:
That's weird. I've never seen or heard of this. Did you, by and chance, had Jaguar on your Mac and do an Upgrade to Panther, rather then an A&I?
Click to expand...

i bought the full version of panther but i did the upgrade install from shaguar. think that's the key?
 
heyadol said:
i bought the full version of panther but i did the upgrade install from shaguar. think that's the key?
Click to expand...

It could very well be. There were lots of things that weren't installed or installed properly via the Upgrade method. I'd be interested to see if the others that have seen this also Upgraded, rather then A&I'd.
 
Well i am a kind of person who likes his privet things privet. Unless you really trust your roommate i would suggest you change your password.

Tips on passwords:
When picking a password pick 2 short words such as pink and hello. Pick another short number you will alwas remmber such as 775 the room i alwas go to when i stay at a sertin hotel for example and put them togther pink775hello. To go one step fearther use uppercase and lowwer ones so the password would be something like PInK775HElLO were the 3rd letter would be lowwer case. This is simple to do and very hard for people to find it, even if someone saw it it would be hard for him to remmber it or guess it.
 
Any words that appear in a dictionary make cracking a password that much easier. Even with trivial replacements like capital letters and symbols. A true strong password should consist of 8 or more characters and be part of a "passphrase". A passphrase consists of a phrase that has special meaning to you, therefore making it easier to remember your password. Something along the lines of:

Homer Simpson for President. I am serious!

From this you can easily extract the first letter of each word, giving you:

hsfpias

That's a fairly hard password to crack, but it's too short. Make it harder by using the punctuation from the sentence.

hsfp.ias!

Now that is a hard password to crack. But let's step it up a bit more by capitalizing some letters and adding some numbers, say, the year I was born:

HSfp.ias!71

Voila, a truly difficult password to crack, but is still easy to remember. Feel free to liberally assault it with non-alphanumeric character replacements for greater difficulty (but a bit of "unwieldiness").
In your face, Space Coyote!
 
yellow said:
A true strong password should consist of 8 or more characters and be part of a "passphrase".
Click to expand...

This is my choice for choosing passwords as well. I enjoy using movie lines.

Hgbghwcul8r

"Hey guys, Big Gulps huh? Welp, see you later!"
 
Mine is pretty simple ...

The initials of my children names + my wife's and my initials combined with the year the kids were born and the initials of the countries where they were born, plus, the date I met my wife and the date we got married ... :D :D

Man! I couldn't forget that!! :p :p

That's only for my mac, my wife's mac has a different one and all of the 3 E-mails we manage has a different one, we love private life ;)
 
Solafaa said:
Well i am a kind of person who likes his privet things privet. Unless you really trust your roommate i would suggest you change your password.

Tips on passwords:
When picking a password pick 2 short words such as pink and hello. Pick another short number you will alwas remmber such as 775 the room i alwas go to when i stay at a sertin hotel for example and put them togther pink775hello. To go one step fearther use uppercase and lowwer ones so the password would be something like PInK775HElLO were the 3rd letter would be lowwer case. This is simple to do and very hard for people to find it, even if someone saw it it would be hard for him to remmber it or guess it.
Click to expand...
Misspelling helps too :D




I'm sorry, I couldn't help it :eek:
 
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