Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 November 11

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November 11

Capital letters in non-Latin, non-Cyrillic passwords

Many alphabets not developed in Europe lack the concept of letter case, which of course is useful for passwords by doubling the number of letter-character options; for example, English has 52 letter "options" when composing a password, while Hebrew has only 37 even if you use niqqud. How has this lack been addressed in non-Latin, non-Cyrillic alphabetical computing environments — is it ignored in all situations, simply resulting in fewer possible passwords, or have some programmers devised alternate mechanisms for complicating passwords that aren't generally employed in Latin or Cyrillic computing environments? Nyttend (talk) 13:16, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

• I cannot answer the question directly, but I will note that there are multiple languages covered by Unicode that do not use an alphabet or a syllabary, most notably Standard Chinese. In that language at least, character input methods such as Shuangpin involve typing a roman transliteration (Pinyin). I presume, based on unreliable sources such as this thread, that the computer systems take the Pinyin input as the password, not the Unicode code points of the characters themselves. This may also be of interest. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 13:55, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't know about more modern systems, but Windows XP had no problem with Unicode characters in user passwords. Once my computer somehow booted with the English keyboard setup and I had to look up Alt codes for some of the characters in my password (a real pain before the age of ubiquitous smartphones and Internet connections). 93.142.69.105 (talk) 20:56, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, that's interesting. I'd thought about Chinese, but I ignored it because I figured that it was on the opposite end of the spectrum: you can use any Unicode-compatible character you want, so the number of permutations for a given number of glyphs is immensely larger than with the same number of glyphs in any alphabetical system. I didn't count on Latin inputs for anything that doesn't display as Latin. Nyttend (talk) 02:57, 12 November 2017 (UTC)