Dumb Ass Alert: Don't use Emoji Icons in Passwords

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“I’m a big fan of pushing emoji to their limits in weird places, but this guy learned the hard way when he took it too far and used one as his password,” Owen Williams reports for TNW. “Turns out, OS X doesn’t like it if you use an emoji password, as you’re banned from entering an emoji password on the login screen so the poor guy was locked out of his computer.”

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I wanted to check if it’s possible to use emoji in a password for my Account on OS Yosemite. It worked but I didn’t realize that the login screen has only native keyboards, so I can’t type emoji there. So the situation is that I know my password but I can’t type it. The machine has rebooted to the Recovery HD and I don’t see a way to enable the emoji keyboard there. In effect, since FileVault was turned on, I can’t restore the password easily. – Ask Different user

Williams reports, “In the end he resolved it by jumping into recovery mode, booting from an external drive, installing an emoji keyboard, disabling encryption and waiting a number of hours before he was able to log in again.”

Read more in the full article here.

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Dan Uff

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