Fedora 19 To Stop Masking Passwords 234
First time accepted submitter PAjamian writes "Maintainers of the Anaconda installer in Fedora have taken it upon themselves to show passwords in plaintext on the screen as they are entered into the installer. Following on the now recanted statements of security expert Bruce Schneier, Anaconda maintainers have decided that it is not a security risk to show passwords on your screen in the latest Alpha release of Fedora 19. Members of the Fedora community on the Fedora devel mailing list are showing great concern over this change in established security protocols." Note: the change was first reported in the linked thread by Dan Mashal.
Windows 8 (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the way Windows 8 addressed this problem. They added a button that looks like an eye on the right hand side of the password field to show the password as you've typed it. That seems like a better compromise than briefly showing the password characters.
Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Show password as I type" checkbox (Score:4, Interesting)
The log-in and sign-up pages on Phil's Hobby Shop have a "Show password as I type" checkbox. Is this what you were looking for?
As a MacOS X developer, the developer can mark text entry fields as "password". A major effect of this that other applications (like external spelling checkers, for example) don't have access to what you are typing. The other effect is that the input is hidden.
At the moment, you can't have a password field that gives protection against malware that could be on your computer, _and_ at the same time displays the password. Only one or the other.