name for visually similar characters

[andrewjohn81]

I was just wondering if there was a name for this.

It's really annoying when people use these in passwords, serial numbers, and others like that.

zero and the letter o or capital i with lowercase l.

Some fonts kind of solve these problems, but many don't.


Anyone know if there's a name for this? If there's not, maybe there should be so we can yell at people for using things like that. Not sure off the top of my head if there are more examples. There are more if you only have a dot matrix display, like 5 and z. Otherwise I think it's just the two.

Someone made a password for us that has all of these in it and sent us an image of the password, so you can't even copy and paste. What's worse is it's for an ftp site that locks up after 3 consecutive tries. It really makes me want to strangle my computer.

[sea2stars]

Hah. Too funny.

Homoglyph

[andrewjohn81]

That's awesome. I didn't realize you could call the multi-letter ones homoglyphs as well.

Thanks for the quick update. I knew one of you would know the answer to that.

[mike_kennedy]

I always reply back and explain that the password is impossible and pretty please send us another one that we can actually use. Bet you any money the IT guy copied and pasted too when using it...

[andrewjohn81]

I told him to avoid those letters in the future, but nicely. He's my only IT guy for the department, so i'd like to keep a friendly relationship with him. Probably not a great idea to get your only IT guy mad at you. He is often my only connection to the more global IT sections of the company which i often need to get the correct permissions out on the network. (even though my IT guy doesn't know much about actual computers, lol)

[judderman]

I have a habit now whenever I write a zero down by hand, I put a diagonal score through it - people think it's funny looking, (and probably a bit pointless if it's a phonenumber) but at least they know if it's a zero and not an O! Say - if you're writing down a reference number for car insurance or the like...