[DonHopkins]

I posted this earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21862160

There's a much more evil prank than that:

A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:

It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!

[alistairSH]

Holy crap. That's amazingly evil. And not at all what I thought you were going to say

[ajxs]

My employer made me use an SOE Macbook that had the 'butterfly keyboard'. Many of its keys would only work haphazardly. Once I made the mistake of setting my password using the laptop's keyboard instead of the external one I normally used. It had me going for ages before I realised there was one letter in the password missing!

[gnicholas]

I find it incredibly annoying that my iPad wants to automatically capitalize the first letter of most text-entry fields. I heard somewhere that some sites have made the first char of their passwords case-insensitive because of this, but IDK if this is just lore.

[Merad]

I used to work at a company that had some LoB apps used on iPads in a manufacturing facility... if the user login failed and the first character of the password was upper case those apps would retry with it lower case.

[cschep]

easily disabled which is good!

[gnicholas]

Not on the client-side! Sometimes it happens when you're typing the first char, in which case you can hit shift (which is visibly activated) and then type the char. But sometimes it 'autocorrects' when you hit the return key, and the only workaround I've found is to type the password with the first char doubled, and then go back and delete the first of the doubled chars. Not fun, especially when you're navigating the cursor on a touchscreen!

[cschep]

huh - if you disable this in the keyboard settings it still persists? Is it a browser input issue? not fun :D

[gnicholas]

I don't think there's a granular way to do this, shy of turning off autocorrect in its entirety.

[jlg23]

Being fed up with people asking to use my laptop (some 20 years ago), I cleaned its keyboard and put the caps back on at random. "Yes, of course you can use it, here you are! Oh, sorry, I forgot the keyboard..." Peace and undisturbed working ensued...

[chmod775]

Many people with mechanical keyboards (as in non-disposable keyboards) can probably relate to this, having put some keys back the wrong way after cleaning.

[zdragnar]

It's why the das keyboard with blank key caps was my favorite I've ever owned. It forced me to actually touch-type, rather than touch type the common keys and look for the rest.

[chmod775]

Then one always have trouble typing from unfamiliar angles that invalidate ones muscle memory, instead of only when someone swapped some caps...

[chmod775]

*Then one always has

[lobocinza]

This happened to me ~2 times I think due to exhaustion and/or stress. Just had to sleep to remember.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Great prank (the car swap). Must’ve cost quite a bit, though.

If you have an iPhone, this app is pretty damn hilarious: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/action-movie-fx/id489321253

It’s done by Bad Robot (JJ Abrams’ company). Shows how easy it is to do really good special effects, these days.

[thatjoeoverthr]

Once I got home and found my toddler had completely shuffled the letters on my keyboard.

[Arrath]

Oh my god that car prank you linked was incredible.