alt Hacker NewsExpiring passwords and length limits. Why can't my password be a 5KB long? My password manager has no limits. Are people storing them in plain text in 2026?
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And content limits. Why can't my password contain the % character? No special characters? What makes a character "special"? Why can't it contain emoji? So many password systems go to great lengths to remove potential entropy and randomness from passwords with their rules. The usual excuse is "blah blah blah legacy systems" which is not a good reason.
I ran into a website for work that would let you create a long password, but silently truncate it to 12 characters before saving. Mind boggling.
> Why can't my password be a 5KB long?
Probably because that's just unnecessary. A few dozen characters is plenty, anything beyond that is just excessive.
I wouldn’t trust enterprise internet security boxes to not trip on such long text fields.
> Why can't my password be a 5KB long?
You should switch to Windows, Microsoft got you covered[1].
[1]: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Arch...