encoding - How can I use a password with special characters in desktop programs?

07
2014-07
  • Guest

    At the moment I am concerned about the security of my Facebook account. I have taken advantage of Facebook's ability to accept very long passwords with special characters, and created a password that is very long and has such characters (such as ⊖, ⊒, ⋑, etc.) The idea is that anyone trying to hack my Facebook account would either be confused by the password, or would be unable to type, or copy and paste said password into Facebook with Windows. (The hackers I am concerned about run Windows.)

    The password works when I copy and paste it into the Facebook home page, but the problem is, it doesn't work when I copy and paste it into programs like Telepathy, my desktop chat application that connects to Facebook, or Spotify, which I login to with my Facebook password. Is there a way that I can get these programs to read the password correctly? Maybe the programs (on an individual basis) have a file where the passwords themselves are kept, and I can put the password there.

    The main point here is to keep my Facebook account secure from hackers that use paid, online programs to get my Facebook password. I would like to understand, too, what the issue actually is: does the GUI that asks me for the password only accept characters in an encoding that does not support the characters I use?

    Thank you very much.

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  • Related Answers
  • Sjoerd

    Use --password=password or --ftp-password.

  • Bernhard Kausler

    You need to encode special characters in your password using URL encoding. For example, if the user is "user1" and the password "12#j" the resulting URL would look as follows:

    user1:12%23j@myserver:port
    

    Note, that I replaced the # character with its URL-code %23 .