Every so often I change the passwords on all the accounts I regularly use. Yesterday I decided to change my instant messenger passwords: Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Skype. Yahoo & Skype went off without a hitch. For ease of remembering them I use the same password for all my IM accounts. Due to the fact that I’m using the same passwords across different networks I use long phrases with numbers and capitals mixed in and change them often.
Apparently MSN & AIM allow you to type in and confirm however long a password as you want but then truncate it on their end without telling you. This isn’t much of a problem for MSN as their client does the same invisible truncation before login but when trying to connect with a third party client typing in the full password results in an incorrect password error. After about 10 times I figured it out and figured out where it truncated so it’s okay for now although I’m going to go through and change all my accounts to a shorter password so they’re all the same.
AIM/AOL I don’t know what happened but I now cannot login to an account I’ve had for 4 years. It allowed me to change the password but won’t accept it. I know I’m typing it correctly because I pasted it in. Luckily I only use AIM to communicate with a couple of people.
I’m wondering why any service would prevent you from choosing a password as long as you like. With all the talk about phishing, hacking, etc a longer password is better. MySpace also pulls the same crap with arbitrary short password limits. It just doesn’t make sense.
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