Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: Atomic-S on 11/01/2013 06:53:18
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I have just had my computer professionally cleanses of malware.
Tonight I attempted to log onto my on-line e-Mail service, that stores my e-Mails on the remote server. I entered my username & password as requested. The web site kept coming back that the password was not valid. I was browsing with Google Chrome at the time. Being susipcious, I switched to Internet Explorer. This time the web site acknowledge my password and I was able to log on.
What puzzles me is why the results should be different with different browsers. Is not the purpose of a browser to connect the user to a web site? If so, would not the transactions involving passwords depend only on the web site and not on which browser was being used? Especially after the computer had just been de-bugged of malware.
On interesting feature of the episode is that the web site in question is www.live.com , which is associated with Windows. Microsoft makes both Windows and Internet Explorer. This suggest an at least theoretical conflict of interest with regard to making the site accessible by browsers that are not financially associated with the site (although I have no evidence that such considerations are actually at work here).
Does anyone know what might be going on here, that would make it possible to send a recognizable password through one browser but not through another?
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I entered my username & password as requested. The web site kept coming back that the password was not valid. I was browsing with Google Chrome at the time. Being susipcious, I switched to Internet Explorer. This time the web site acknowledge my password and I was able to log on.
What puzzles me is why the results should be different with different browsers. Is not the purpose of a browser to connect the user to a web site? If so, would not the transactions involving passwords depend only on the web site and not on which browser was being used? Especially after the computer had just been de-bugged of malware.
Does anyone know what might be going on here, that would make it possible to send a recognizable password through one browser but not through another?
Possible Explanation #1. human error : wrong password entered in chrome browser, correct password entered in Internet Explorer.
Possible Explanation #2. Browser properties called cookies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie) and/or JavaScript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript) not being enabled can prevent you interacting fully with certain websites. You could have cookies and/or JavaScript enabled on one browser but not on another browser, so a website would function correctly with the former and not with the latter.
However the response would either refer to "cookies" or "JavaScipt", not “password not valid”
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It’s a remote possibility the website you were trying to login to which delivered a “password not valid” response, despite being given the correct password, was a dummy look-alike login page : a scam called phishing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing) to get you to tell your login details. If this is a possibility you should change your password for that site ASAP. Your browser should give you details to show whether the site is the real McCoy, ( a link to possibly dodgy site you visited may be in your browser history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browsing_history) ) : click on the padlock icon on the left end of the address box for details (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EV_certificate) ...
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Interesting. Thanks for the tips.
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Could depend on the characters you enter and the "default page charset specified by the browser" in unix its often UTF-8 in Win its usually 1252 or 8859-1, there was some minor difference between Moz-Netscape browsers and IE in URL encoding is another but more a glitch or bug in the early days(note: IE only adheres to w3c to have compatibility, google is likely in every respect to be a UNIX based system not DOS), but as much there is a problem that cryption is used on login pages and servers have their own version of charset-accept setting as a global CGI variable.
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The content and the accessibility of the content on some pages change depending on your browser. to by-pass this, you can get a firefox addon called User Agent Switcher.