This is just some wild guessing and assumptions: In Windows there's a
Language option in the Control Panel where you can specify Italy and
many other places I've never been to. I just did that and the top row
on my keyboard comes out like this when I hold the shift key:
EN English: !@#$%^&*()_+
IT Italy: !"£$%&/()=?^
So if you were using a PC belonging to an Italian, maybe the odd
characters were typed but you couldn't tell because of the asterisk echo
in a password field. If that's the case, then yes, copy/paste should
work because it isn't the codepage or hex code that is changing between
countries (non-mainframe), it's the keyboard. But I would have thought
the printed text on an Italian keyboard would also reflect these
changes. So maybe this isn't such a good theory after all.
John Mattson wrote:
I try to include the special characters on standard US keyboards in
some of my passwords. On a trip it Italy, I attempted to login to some
websites (not anything very secure of course) and I found that the
passwords always failed. I could only conclude that the local hex encoding
for the ! @ and/or # characters was different from what it is on a US
keyboard. Now since these are in pretty common use, especially @ and #, I
thought they would be no problem, but I was wrong.
Now, I could carry my passwords on a US thumb drive and paste them, but
I would rather find out what special characters are common to most European
keyboards, and select from those. I have not found anything helpful in
Google. Does anyone have and information on this?
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