Wednesday 4 February 2009

Password strength

I got a smartphone, so I could keep up with email, without being tied to my desk.

Lo and behold, it doesn't support Unicode.

Which means that options are either to not use the phone for checking email, IM,and the like, or changing my passwords to something that is pathetically weak.

Both customer service, and level 1 tech support, and level 2 tech support didn't even know what Unicode was, much less how to switch to it. Level 3 tech support said it isn't available. However, if I was a programmer, I might be able to write a program to work around that limitation,but I'd still would have to deal with Microsoft's design flaws.

So, my options are to not use the smartphone for email, IM, and texting, or to change my passwords from my usual A]PᚑᚒᚓσδϐᏬשب@15ᚔᚕ6, to the pathetically insecure US-ANSI character set.

If Samsung were a two bit mom and pop company, their monolingualism might be understandable. But since their website is in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, English, Persian, Russian, Turkish, amongst other languages, the lack of Unicode support in their phones is utterly inexcusable.

Microsoft has repeatedly proven itself to be linguistically challenged, barely capable of supporting US English, and is a bastion of illiteracy. (Literacy is defined as the ability to read, write, and speak fluently five different languages.)