

Etrade.com: “Your password cannot contain spaces or special characters.” - amenghra

why?
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skylark
I guarantee to you it was an informed, calculated decision, not laziness or
incompetence on anybody's part.

I'm working for a Fortune 25 company, and one of the main drivers behind our
website redesign is that we're losing a significant amount of money providing
assistance to people who aren't tech savvy.

Making passwords case insensitive, preventing special characters, and other
such things are mostly there to cut down on people accidentally creating a
password they can't remember and then calling in to get a password reset.
Those costs aren't trivial when you're serving tens of millions of people per
month, a large percentage of whom are elderly and have trouble using computers
at all.

Additional layers of security can be added through more creative means and are
typically more effective with people who don't use computers all day (two
factor authentication by sending a verification code through text message when
an unknown IP is used, etc.).

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chrisBob
If it is intentional then that is bad news. Anything that asks me for a
password and won't accept the dashes that Safari puts in when it recommends
one for me just gets 'Password1!'. Oh, you won't even take punctuation? You
just get 'Password1'.

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dylz
Because you can use your password by entering it via a phone keypad to IVR.

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88e282102ae2e5b
One "justification" I've heard is that it makes it harder for someone with a
keylogger on your computer to search through all the text you've typed to find
password-like phrases. Pretty dumb IMHO, but reasonable enough to be
believable.

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bbcbasic
Because the password correcthorsebatterystaple is secure enough.

~~~
ljk
from here [https://xkcd.com/936/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

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pm24601
because their code is vulnerable to sql injection attacks?

That is the only reason I can think of.

