HN user

epicalex

174 karma
Posts5
Comments17
View on HN

I believe the British Airways site still does something similar to this, or it did until very recently if it's been fixed. Add a password that is too long, it gets truncated and the truncated version saved with no warning or error.

It took me several password reset attempts to realise what was going on, as my literally just set and password manager-saved password didn't work.

I think in BA's case the password input also had a character limit on it, which is ultimately how I realised what was happening, even though there was no info anywhere that such a limit existed.

I've just had a similar experience with ebay.

About 75% of the times I log on to ebay, (no exaggeration, I only purchase something a few times a year and this happens almost every time), my account gets locked for suspected unauthorised access and I'm forced to reset my password.

I have a static IP, and only ever use the same two devices. I have a strong unique password.

I spent 15 minutes on the phone with their account security team who could tell me nothing about what triggered the lock, nor did they have any advice on what I could do to prevent this from recurring.

Something in their automated system is giving a false positive, and neither I nor seemingly anyone on the account security team has any way to address it.

It's not just you. I don't have any sources to link to, but 15 years ago a website was frowned upon for having light text on an (almost) black background because it was bad for readability and made your eyes strain.

I tended to agree and find this dark mode craze quite curious because of how the industry has completely flipped its opinion.

Maybe someone has sources/studies that contradict this, but that's my memory of the situation.

This has become increasingly frustrating for me, and I now have to overuse quoting to get the things I want.

Why would I include a word if I wanted results that didn't include it. I could understand that on later pages to include more results, but regularly even the very first results don't include one of the key words in my search.

When I changed my password there, not too long ago, it was worse. The "change password" page (I later discovered) silently cropped the long random password I pasted, while the "log in" page required the saved (truncated) password exactly. I don't know how they expected anyone to figure that out

The British Airways site does exactly the same thing, took me about 5 attempts at resetting my password before I realised what was going on...

Mmm, Pi-hole 8 years ago

Wouldn't that in itself involve tracking your behaviour on the web, though, which is what commenters on this thread started off saying they disliked?

I believe technically it requires lower bitrates to maintain the same quality (as mp4 etc), as opposed to just having de facto better quality. The lower bitrate is what results in less bandwidth usage.