And then the iPhone glass REALLY won't break! (haha)

I hate the length limit too. I commented about how sometimes there is a length limit, but it happebs automatically, making your 80 character password 20 characters, and impossible to log in...

But it shouldn't even be a database issue. Unless I am mistaken, the length of hashes isn't (or at least doesn't have to be) dependent on the length of the input, so the database should store the same amount of information for "password" as for the entirety of beowulf...

Granted, that would take a lot longer for the hasher, but there are generally already things in place to prevent robots trying to bring down the system by attempting login many times a second, no?

I did not describe what I was doing very well; see my response to my original comment.

The clipboard is just being used to confirm the bug; the first time I attempt to create a password obviously I should not make a habit of doing this.

Sorry I guess I didn't describe the bug properly: often websites accept a long password to create the password, but apparently drop the rest of the string after a certain amount of characters which makes a password of fewer characters than the user wanted.

This wouldn't cause a problem (aside from being a security hole) except when I go to type in my long password to log in, the software takes the entire string and does not drop off the characters after the limit used in creating the password, effectively making it so I cannot log on with the password I tried to sign up with.

I use the clipboard only for testing to see if this bug is there; eliminating the potential that perhaps I just typed my password in incorrectly.

For example, I sign up for a user on website with username "username" and password "This is a very long and secure password". The site, in order to prevent the string being too long, only accepts 20 characters, making my password "This is a very long ". Ok. When I go to log in, however, there is no character dropping, and so it compares my password "This is a very long and secure password" to "This is a very long ", which obviously do not match, and I cannot log in, even though I am typing the same string every time.

This is the bug I was trying to describe and is very frustrating.

Anyone remember opera turbo?
http://www.opera.com/turbo

There are also often (not told to the user!) length limits on passwords

I like making my passwords a sentence. Whether it is more secure or not, it is easier for me to remember and I like to pretend I believe it is super secure.

However, I have had several places where I make a user, make a password (which it thinks is super strong because it is like 50 characters), copy-paste it somewhere, and it says I have a user. I then try to login using the copy-pasted password, and it tells me I have a bad password. going through the password-reset process, it invariably works if I reset it to a much shorter password.

This is a bug that really annoys me, especially with xkcd encouraging people who might not know about this popular bug to make long passwords.

Don't forget http://www.ghostery.com/

I was going to say that there's always a drawback that's worse than the thing you are trying to fix, otherwise evolution would have fixed it long ago.

But reading more, it seems they just fixed a degenerative disease. Which is not universal and not eradicated nearly as well by evolution. ok.

Except as soon as you hire an amateur, he becomes a professional...

amateur- not a profession (simplest is not paid for work)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amateur

professional- paid for the work
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional

As another victim of crappy multi-LED clusters, you have now convinced me to maybe give LEDs another try. I will definitely, however, go for quality this time.

I want to see this website!

I'm a violinist and had to sub for a percussionist once... Never again will I say counting is easy...

Great article! Bookmarked and will definitely pass on to other people. Thank you!

yes. it says this in the article he linked to. It's long, but please read it.

He also wants to get the voting equivalent of an impulse buy. Sadly, too many people vote like this as well.