Jun 23, 2009 0
Password Masking
Password masking is the HTML thingy that replaces your password characters with bullet-points as you type. It may not be the perfect or most effective way to stop snoopers, but it’s not meant to be. It’s only meant to be good enough to stop most snoopers – at the very least make it somewhat inconvenient. And it covers casual as well as determined distance creepers with binoculars. He says:
More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.
While I agree with Jakob’s general observations about usability and the apparent cost of failed password attempts, I think the alternative isn’t quite acceptable. Because frankly, we’re not all sitting alone in our office. Many of us, are in fact, in the real world…like airports and coffee shops.
