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#apple#keyboard#password#user#why#english#czech#don#should#passcode
Discussion (211 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Sounds more like an actual bug than a decision to change the keyboard layout, if this happens only in the passcode screen?
Then he couldn’t login, because login screen does not have a special character keyboard.
EDIT: found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10742351 (apparently I remember it slightly wrong, but idea still the same)
And do your could backups cross-provider. You never know what the "big players" are going to pull, and your lifetime customer value is less than the cost of a single support call.
yes that is the pattern, pioneered by Google here in California
On PCs you still have Linux that resists enshittification and you can pick your own hardware, but it's a really sad state of affairs that there is literally no meaningful mobile system that isn't actively hostile to the user.
People need to wake up to the fact that Android has become iOS but worse.
I'm quite wary of using SD card for backup. Too easy for me to lose.
You wan't to access some files off your network using smb? Here install this third party tool and don't forget to give it full read/write access to your device.
Or release some sort of open version once device is EOL'd.
Also people find exploits on newer OS versions as well. Downgrading makes it easier but not downgrading doesn’t make the device unhackable.
Apple should be forced to do this by law, but only after they discontinue software support. If they're willing to continue making small, incremental patches when necessary (such as to fix this obvious bug) then it's fine that they can still block downgrades. But at EOL? They should be legally required to allow old software to be installed.
This also impacts software compatibility - any 64-bit device that is now EOL that got updated to iOS 11 or newer is forever barred from running 32-bit apps just because people are worried that someone might take that old device and downgrade it as an attack?
The average person should always stay updated to the latest version for security reasons. But the power users should be able to choose which version they run, at least on devices that aren't currently supported at all.
Daily reminder that the first two iPhones and the first iPod touch had zero firmware signing, and you could freely install any supported version at any time, and can still do so today. That being the case has probably harmed 0.00001% of people at most
Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave if he could see the software quality of the products that Apple releases today.
lol, nah he wouldn't. He would of upgraded his coffin to plush and got a big screen to watch the money roll in.
I recommend reading up on his 80/90's antics. All he cared about was money and that the world was crafted by him.
He was widely known for intense bullying, lacking empathy, and ruthless manipulation, combined with a "productive narcissism" that fueled his obsessive drive for perfection.
Incorrect. Read the David Pogue Apple book. For example, after the iMac was released, the Apple board of directors offered Jobs a million shares and six million options if he switched from interim to permanent CEO. Jobs continued to refuse. “This is not about money. I have more money than I’ve ever wanted in my life.”
Most of Steve's wealth came from Pixar, which he ultimately sold to Disney, rather than from Apple.
Even if Apple restores the háček in a future update, wouldn't he still need to unlock the iPhone to install it?
I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?
In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"
Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone security for law enforcement and the like, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do it (at any price) unless you could somehow trick them into thinking you had some "interesting" data on there...
Sure they have most of their stuff translated but some rough edges make me feel they do the bare minimum:
- Their ISO keyboard sucks. Sure their overall quality makes it good but of the major brands their Enter key is the most flimsy attempt at it
- Some long standing bugs https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250299816?sortBy=rank (which I had the impressions they were made worse in localized version or at least if you used a non American date format)
- General weirdness with translation missing sometimes
And from what I've seen, Apple's always supported fewer languages and input methods than Google/Microsoft, like they simply cant be bothered.
I don't think we can assume the team is large.
On a typewriter, I would expect one to type the latin character, hit backspace, and then add the mark? Or if using a typewriter without the necessary mark, just type the latin characters, then add the marks with a pen to the full sheet.
Just interns pushing to prod without any review? What the hell is going on in the software industry?
Such mistakes a trillion dollar company can not allow to happen.
Twice I have had the touchscreen fail on Android devices and been able to get what I needed off them using a USB mouse.
Makes sense why he didn't do this.
sigh.
That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:
https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/ekonomika/apple-posili-v-praze-ty...
https://jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200636301-2611/software...
Alexa has an experimental bilingual mode but it's nerfed by its general failure to understand well.
Only thing I can think of is some features being available later in danish compared to the English release like the swipe keyboard in iOS.
Language support is still such an enigma.
People are afraid of AI, but human organizations can be quite opaque as well.
That said, as a Czech, I wouldn't use any accentuated characters in my passwords. Anything beyond 7-bit ASCII is just asking for trouble.
If you read the ancient Greek stories, a consistent theme is that, if you offend the gods, they will punish you...
...but they're at least as likely to do it by cursing someone blameless who will then have an effect on you as they are by cursing you directly.
I don't have a text password on my iphone so I don't know whether you can paste into that field.
Since the user doesn't speak Czech, I promptly removed the Czech layout and installed two other layouts, US English and Hebrew, for the languages that the relative uses to type on the computer.
For some reason, login screen just after boot still uses Czech layout, which means Z and Y are swapped and numbers must be typed with Shift (just pressing numbers outputs Czech letters like ěščř). So when booting up the machine (remember that you can't use fingerprint during first unlock), the user must type the password in whatever layout is physically printed on the keys, even though the rest of the OS doesn't even have a mention of that layout. Somehow afterwards the OS "can" see the list of the layouts and lock screen correctly chooses the English US layout.
Alongside of that, for some reason, the key that's supposed to type ` and ~ in the US layout types some nonsense instead (a plus-minus sign and a section sign), whereas the backtick key is for some reason located between left Shift and Z (good luck unlearning years of muscle memory typing ~/Documents in the terminal)
I've never had a reason to try it, but there's also a remark that 99% of the Macs sold probably don't need to change the system-wide keyboard layout defaults, either...
[1] - https://heylon.ca/how-to-permanently-switch-default-keyboard...
[2] - https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-the-system-l...
That's just excuses for moronic decisions of trillion dollar companies.
It seems paramount that the OS should not allow password input of any characters which it theater takes away. At the very minimum if this is absolutely necessary to make this breaking change, the user should be warned several times that a character in the password is no longer valid and maybe even prevent the OS from upgrading before the password is changed to a forward-compatible one.
But there is already a known pattern on how to handle this which I was taught (before the original iPhone even) in university CS studies:
If the manner of entering credentials has to change,
Then on first entry, offer the old method,
And, because you now (temporarily) have the plaintext credentials, you can now inspect it and test if anything need to change for the future,
And then set a flag, or require user action , or just re-encode, to use the new method as inspection determines.
In the olden times, even ASCII wasn’t necessarily a safe bet, as many countries used their own slight variation of ASCII. For example, Japan had the Yen sign in place of the backslash. In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.
As a non-English speaker (Czech, actually), it is clear to me to not use non-ASCII characters in passwords, or generally not use characters that are at different position on default English keyboard and locally used keyboards, i.e. use only ASCII alphanumeric chars except 'Y' and 'Z'.
As keyboard setting is per-user setting, keyboard may be different on login screen than on regular desktop (and once-login password prompts).
Do you think most users know this?
Also, most devices nowadays ARE single user. And most (all?) OSes allow you to use alternative keyboards at the user-selection screen.
Also, all orgs recommend special characters in passwords. Czech keyboards default to accented letters on the top row instead of numbers, so why wouldn't your average Czech use those?
No that's obviously crazy!
The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or having nearly 100% test coverage, how does a company not accidentally have more of these types of issues?
This bug got popularity that’s all.
I have recently discovered several bugs in different products created by different companies. And none has been reported so far in my research despite the products' popularity. I am not surprised, since those bugs require specific combination of conditions to be triggered, which most people have never run into, like in this article.
And I don't even blame them -- the engineers probably could never think of such use cases and don't have those workflows themselves. You'd have to really go out of your way to use obscure workflows to discover them.
Although in this case Apple dropped the ball by locking user out and not providing any alternatives.
They don't. If you're anything other than an extremely casual user of iOS or macOS for a couple of years, you'll encounter things that really make you pull your hair out by shear magnitude of "how on Earth can anyone miss this!?".
The same goes for feature velocity.
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
The user can't even enter their passcode, how do you expect them to perform code execution?
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
Why can't people read stuff before commenting?
Why can't people read stuff before?
Why can't people read stuff?
Why can't people read?
Why can't people?
Why can't?
Why?
?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I'm basically numb to it at this point though. Every few days we read on this site small permutations of the same story. Sometimes people here get a little extra backchannel support, but that's a token prize for the jester who made a king chuckle.
Then a few more days go by and everyone upvotes a new iWidget to oblivion because it has 0.1 new gigablahs or takes up a milliblah less of some bullshit nobody was asking for.
All while we collectively virtue signal that people are spending too much time and relying on technology too much.
Well, it's almost Monday let's see what new bullshit convinces everyone to keep getting fucked and pay for the privilege.
I basically have turned into this guy: https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ
Here's a challenge: walk into a store and attempt to buy a smartphone that is not iPhone or Android.
This is the situation that consumers face. Some alternatives exist, but most consumers are completely unaware of them, because the alternatives have no advertising budget or retail presence.
I think it's quite similar to the political duopoly. Third parties exist, but they have no advertising budget, and moreover, in a Catch-22 situation, they get little or no news coverage, precisely because they have no advertising budget, and thus the news media considers them "not viable." That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Actually the same situation exists in tech: Apple and Google get huge amounts of free news coverage in addition to their paid advertising. The media appears to feel no obligation to help people escape from duopolies; guess who pays for their advertising...
Want to take pictures? Use a camera. If it somehow auto updates your photos are still on an SD card.
I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working. When you're in a pinch you will go to a 7-Eleven and grab food, but everyone would agree that buying everything there instead of real groceries is a terrible strategy. Just because something is convenient doesn't mean it's good.
It's mostly working, though. For every story of someone experencing a severe problem, there are millions of non-stories of people not experiencing the problem.
Inconveniencing yourself every day just to avoid the rare situation is not necessarily a great life strategy. Furthermore, most consumers are not as aware of these problem cases as we are. They don't expect the worst until it's too late.
Admittedly, failing to back up is just dumb, and everyone should know that by now. On the other hand, nobody should be expecting that a software update will kill their passcode.
Be aware of characters not passwords. I feel bad for the guy but not really blame Apple here.
English is my second language and ANSI etc is following a basic character usage. Everything must boil down to 0 and 1 in the end or American English.
It is a de facto standard and maybe knowing about it is as crucial as recognizing the difference between the imperial and metric system before heading for the moon. It is a life saver.