HP laptop can't connect to WiFi with letter 'p' in the password (2018)
h30434.www3.hp.comWhen I was a teenager I wrote a simple visual basic app to globally detect the letter 'e' and immediately send a [backspace] to whatever application the user was working in.
It was a background app and named something like system32.exe which I installed on my girlfriends computer.
The frustration she endured while trying to write an essay for school was next level. I faked trying to help her :D She eventually resorted to copy and pasting 'e' every time she needed one.
For the record, 18 years later she's my wife so she did eventually see the humor in it.
Perhaps it would have taken less than 18 years to get her to marry you if you hadn’t played that joke on her.
Because the text will be "will you marry m?"
Ys
Si
Knowing nothing about the relationship, it might have taken longer than 18 years to get her to marry them if he didn't play that joke on her. Some people are more playful than others :)
Dare I say it, I'm not sure it's that deep.
*dp
There was a funny MS-DOS virus called "Dot.Eater". Whenever you pressed dot key, an ascii face would come from the right side of the screen towards your dot, "eat it" (send backspace) and then run back and exit through the right side of the screen.
I just recently signed up for a European VPS which is known for having the cheapest storage, and thought it was peculiar that the root password they sent me contained only alpha and digit characters, no punctuation or symbols of any kind.
When I then had to use their web-based console to do some administration, I quickly discovered I couldn’t type a “.”, then discovered that many other symbols also didn’t seem to work at this console.
Based on the password, it appears their solution is to simply work around the problem rather than fix it :(((((. Pretty shocking state of affairs for 2023.
Sad, but why shocking?
Imagine you're the backend guy tasked with generating the passwords for new users. You see the problem. Now, technically fixing it involves figuring out which other things users will now be able to screw up with dots. More importantly, socially it could involve anything from making a teammate work on this to making an external vendor fork the overengineered HyperReact framework they are using. While this happens, you will be reporting to your manager that sign up isn't ready and you don't have a clue when they can launch the product.
Or you can remove a few characters from PASSWORD_CHARS, maybe increase the password length a bit to compensate, and call it a day.
You understand that this console doesn’t allow you to “cd ..” (or, more importantly, “cd .ssh”)? I’m saying that this is totally unacceptable and should never have shipped in the first place. There are plenty of other providers who have similar consoles which do not have this problem, so clearly a solution is available. The question is, how are they competent enough to run an VPS warehouse yet not competent enough to install a working console?
Ah, that kind of console! WTF indeed. I was thinking of an administration UI with lots of text fields, like "AWS Management Console" (but that would be probably broken as well if you can't enter a domain name).
Hewlett pulled a similar prank on (P)ackard and they are still together.
This seems to be just a support thread with two comments? Was kinda expecting a full bug explanation or something with a bit more substance as to why this is happening beyond 'it's just very odd'.
The title isn’t even correct - the problem seems to be entering the letter p, not authenticating if the password has the letter p
And the second comment seems to imply it's an issue with password input fields, not wifi in particular
You're asking a bit much from an HP support forum - this is the same level as the Microsoft support forums, aka the blind leading the blind.
Frankly I'm amazed that the reply, despite smelling of useless first-line tech support by wasting an entire paragraph to repeat his question pretty much verbatim, managed to actually offer a useful suggestion of testing with an external keyboard.
Same feeling.
Yet, it is on top of HN (: Humans are interesting!
Agree, this isn't a story, issue, or interesting at all. Flagging.
Well what do you expect from a company whose acronym stands for “Hates P”?
Must be a regional pronunciation!
This must be to prevent users from using "password" as the password (and instead making them use the less likely to be guessed "assword", assuming of course that the attacker doesn't have a HP computer).
"assfrase" should be more secure.
Joking aside, this exact misspelling is probably way down any brute-force list. So, if your threat model is spammers stealing accounts with common passwords and nobody really trying to hack you in particular, it may be secure enough.
Read the comment from the other user who chimed in with the same issue: it occurs in other obscured password boxes as well, has the problem typing 'p' either with physical keyboard or onscreen keyboard, but accepts 'p' input via copy and paste. If this is really an accurate bug description that is a doozy!
It was probably a third-party p. Should have bought a genuine HP p instead!
Well played, sir.
I absolutely loathe those condescending corporate fluff responses "Welcome! I understand you're having issue with x, try doing y and z, all the best!"
So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?
This is an example of a coherent and fairly complete issue description. It may seem like fluff in this case to rephrase the original request, but it makes sense as a blanket policy. It allows the support person to repeat the request with the official terminology and give the customer a chance to say "no, that's not what I meant" before you get 10 emails deep.
Consider that a lot of the support requests come as stream of consciousness posts with typos and no punctuation, written quickly and in anger. This issue could've been "new laptip does not take password. Its correct many times, want my many back" (I'm not joking, I've seen worse) - rephrasing and asking for the missing details can be super helpful there.
See a random selection from the first page of posts for why you'd want to verify you understood the customer: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q...
Applying this practice everywhere instead of "where needed" reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
My personnal pet peeve is the one where every thread on Microsoft support forum gets answered by a long response telling the person to do a scandisk.
> So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?
I'm pretty sure this is because most of the message is copy pasted and they just have a line here and there where they need to reword the users' issue to pretend its personnal.
Hi, I'm Kudrapali, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Expert with 999 years of experience and knowledge about 'your problem'. Have you tried the obvious solution, which you already mentioned didn't work? If you did, and it still doesn't work, have you tried reinstalling the system or buying a new computer?
Do let me know if you require any further help on this. Will be glad to help you.
Thank you for your response. It seems like restarting your computer has not yet fixed your issue. I have escalated this to the correct department.
...
Hi, I'm Septapali, an Independent Advisor with 1007 years of experience. It seems you are having trouble restarting your computer […]
Some customers get rude if you don't talk to them a certain way.
While I'm not particularly impressed with the response either, especially repeating what the customer said back to them like that somehow makes the customer believe you actually understood the problem, the rest is kind of mandatory to set a professional tone so that emotions don't get involved so quickly.
Why? Because corporate boilerplate is quite a lot quicker and requires infinitely less thinking.
Their OKR at that level is probably time to issue resolution. They are a cost center and this is fastest way to close and get to the next ticket with a macro button.
If their OKR was instead product improvement to delight all future customers, say, then the response would have been "oh shit that sounds like an OS issue, let me get some engineers on this."
Repeating what was said is called a backbrief and it's useful to make sure the communication is understood sometimes. It's used as a rule in some very sensitive areas, like military command.
Perhaps some manager at HP "addressed" their customer support misunderstanding users by instituting a rule like this.
Especially at HP. In recent decades it's gone from one of the most respected companies on the planet to bottom of the dog pile.
Never ever again would I buy HP equipment.
The HP brand should have stayed with their test and measurement division (now Keysight), rather than being diluted by slapping it on crappy printers and PCs.
Exactly. And from recent news HP has just 'bobbytrapped' those crappy printers in that third-party inks will no longer work.
Resorting to such low tactics is a sign of desperation.
Edit: I still have a HP LJ-III and it still works. My-my, how HP has gone downhill since then.
I had a similar problem with Belkin Wemo smart plugs. They didn’t reject a specific letter but some passwords just didn’t work so I had to create a separate SSID and then trial and error a password that would work. Never figured out what the issue was.
Some hp intern:
if (password[0] == ‘p’) {
return -1;
}Most likely:
if (password[0] == "Password") return -1; if (password[0] == "password") return -1; ...
Well, that's just taking the iss
What a ain
This is a Windows issue and not unique to this case and only relevant like 4-5 years ago.
Something similar has happened to me. When it has happened to me I press each modifier key (shift, alt, ctrl, FN, win, menu, etc...) and it usually fixes the problem.
Holding down the Ctrl Alt Shift keys on both the left and right side on the keyboard for 3-5 seconds used to be a (low/BIOS-level?) keyboard reset, at least on Windows.
I’ve got a Neato vacuum that won’t keep a connection because my wifi key contains an asterisk. All other devices are fine, but the Neato will routinely disconnect after several hours.
This led me down a rabbit hole to first set up a virtual SSID (which worked but impacted apparent throughput), and then a separate AP for low-bandwidth IoT devices.
I don’t have the time in my life to raise enough clout to get this addressed.
Two customers with the same malware?
It could also just be buggy firmware. I had an HP 4530s and anytime I quickly typed the sequence “oun”, the chrome developer tools would pop open (something low level was translating that sequence into F12).
Turns out this was a known issue and there was a bios update which specifically fixed it. https://forums.tomsguide.com/threads/f-keys-activate-from-ty...
I guess the BIOS is responsible for handling the conversion of some key sequences into extended ASCII, so plausible it could be buggy in this way (but not so plausible for the OP issue). The link doesn't seem to mention a BIOS update or acknowledge it as a known BIOS issue though?
Sorry, see this link https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/233506/working-arou...
The same malware called HP SuperDuperSmartThing™, of course. Laptop manufacturers tend to install a lot of shovelware, and one of them might prevent making "password" your password.
I recall another HP shovelware product acting as a keylogger a few years back...
Found it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/keylogger-fou...
> This file is registered to start via a Scheduled Task every time the user logs into his computer. According to modzero researchers, the file "monitors all keystrokes made by the user to capture and react to functions such as microphone mute/unmute keys/hotkeys."
I was in support at the time and can confirm 1-2-1 recording of all keystrokes to the file mentioned, utterly baffling.
Sounds like a rookie programmer making something that just worked and then not being able to go back and do it properly.
Remember programmers, sometimes it's better just not to complete the task at all than it is to end up with a keylogger that management won't give you time to remove.
There would probably be a few more users complaining if the responsible malware shipped with the laptop.