Apps and Software By Ryan Whitwam May. 14, 2014 3:22 pm
You usually want to make your passwords as strong as possible, especially as security breaches become ever more common on the internet. So it’s interesting that airline JetBlue places such odd restrictions on what can be included in account passwords. For starters, Q and Z are not allowed in your JetBlue online password. The reason for this likely stretches back decades to the early days of touch tone telephony.
Some of JetBlue’s password requirements aren’t bad — for example, they are case sensitive and must include both letters and numbers. Then there’s the strange ban on Q and Z, but you also can’t use any special characters, which make passwords considerably more secure. If you looks at a traditional touch tone telephone keypad, you might get a clue as to why certain characters are singled out here.
Touch tone keypads started appearing on phones in the 1960s, and gradually overtook the old rotary dialers. We eventually settled on a standard layout for letter input on keypads, but it was far from standard at the beginning. Some phones placed Q and Z where they are now, on the 7 and 9 buttons, but others had them on 0 or 1. As for special characters, there is no way to enter those at all. So what does this have to do with website passwords? Well, there’s a little piece of software called Sabre.
Originally released in the 1950s, Sabre is the reservation system used by many airlines, hotels, and travel agents to this day. It’s one of the oldest continuously operating computer system in existence, which means it once primarily relied on inputting passwords via a telephone keypad. Remember, this was long before the internet as we know it existed. It made sense to disallow Q, Z, and special characters in that case — there was simply no reliable way to input them.
You’re obviously not running passwords through legacy Sabre systems when you create a JetBlue account, though. This is likely just an odd holdover that has been passed down through iterations of JetBlue’s software from a time when direct interoperability with Sabre was necessary. There’s a time to break with tradition, though, and it was probably a long time ago in JetBlue’s case.
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Some of JetBlue’s password requirements aren’t bad — for example, they are case sensitive and must include both letters and numbers. Then there’s the strange ban on Q and Z, but you also can’t use any special characters, which make passwords considerably more secure. If you looks at a traditional touch tone telephone keypad, you might get a clue as to why certain characters are singled out here.
Touch tone keypads started appearing on phones in the 1960s, and gradually overtook the old rotary dialers. We eventually settled on a standard layout for letter input on keypads, but it was far from standard at the beginning. Some phones placed Q and Z where they are now, on the 7 and 9 buttons, but others had them on 0 or 1. As for special characters, there is no way to enter those at all. So what does this have to do with website passwords? Well, there’s a little piece of software called Sabre.
Originally released in the 1950s, Sabre is the reservation system used by many airlines, hotels, and travel agents to this day. It’s one of the oldest continuously operating computer system in existence, which means it once primarily relied on inputting passwords via a telephone keypad. Remember, this was long before the internet as we know it existed. It made sense to disallow Q, Z, and special characters in that case — there was simply no reliable way to input them.
You’re obviously not running passwords through legacy Sabre systems when you create a JetBlue account, though. This is likely just an odd holdover that has been passed down through iterations of JetBlue’s software from a time when direct interoperability with Sabre was necessary. There’s a time to break with tradition, though, and it was probably a long time ago in JetBlue’s case.
More...
