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On Friday, January 18, 2002, at 05:51 PM, Clay Caviness wrote:
> though i can see your point, i disagree. for short passwords, say 8-10
> characters, i can understand this. but for longer passphrases of 35-50
> characters, like mine tend to be, occasionally being able to -see- what
> one is typing is very useful. typically, you wouldn't need this, but if
> your typing mechanics are off just a bit that day - say you're not
> quite hitting shift to capitalize the 10th character - you wouldn't
> want to spend minutes wondering what you may be doing wrong when a
> simple checkbox would alleviate it. or, say you use the dvorak keyboard
> layout, as i do, but are using a friend's computer and it's set for
> qwerty. though i'm a fairly speed dvorak touch-typist, my qwerty skills
> have devolved into a quick hunt-and-peck. seeing what i'm typing in
> that case would be helpful indeed.
My point has been made. You shouldn't be typing your passphrase into a
friend's computer. If you do, you don't care intensely about your
key -- which is not a problem. Many people have two keys (1) casual and
(2) secure. In this case, I fail to see the need to have a complicated,
hard to type pass phrase for the casual key.
What if they have been hacked and have key sniffers installed. Look at
GPG, it doesn't echo. My passphrase is 40 characters long or so (as
everyone's should be). I type it wrong every once in a while, but it
shouldn't ever be echoed to the screen.
> the whole suite of PGP desktop tools agree and have an option to
> display the passphrase as it is being typed, as do several other
> PGP/GPG-enabled applications i've used. in every one, it was a checkbox
> in the passphrase dialog box, and it always defaults to hidden.
Yeah.. They strive for convenience on top of secure technology. I would
like to not sacrifice that...
> but hey, you're where the buck stops on this one :)
I am a democratic man. There is always a solution in coding to satisfy
the masses. I have one in mind if a few people refuse to the "the
light" in the above comments so they will be satisfied. :-)
--
Theo Schlossnagle
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