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TidBITS: “…upper ASCII characters in account passwords no longer potentially prevent login or crash the Mac OS X startup sequence.”
Apple: “Addresses an issue in which high ASCII characters in a password could lead to a blue screen at startup, or prevent log in.”
This is one of my mantras: There is no such thing as “high ASCII.” ASCII is a character set with 128 values from 0 to 127. Any numeric value 128 or greater is by definition not ASCII in any way, shape or form. Rather, any such non-ASCII value necessarily belongs to some other character set/encoding. (On a Mac, MacRoman, ISO Latin-1 and Unicode are probably the most commonly encountered.)
It seems TidBITS was merely repeating Apple’s error, but Apple should know better than to use a vague and sometimes misleading non-term like “high ASCII” when meaningful, specific descriptions are readily available, e.g., “Unicode values 128 and higher”, “character values…” or even “non-ASCII characters”—whatever best describes the actual problem.
Pedantically yours,
Chris
P.S. The Apple article at
says “High ASCII” characters are listed in table II of
Note that although table I does indeed contain the ASCII character set, that page incorrectly identifies table II as ASCII as well. In fact, table II contains what is probably a Windows/DOS character set (again, not ASCII in any sense). To their credit, Apple does list some specific characters that cause problems, and I find it interesting to note that those characters, as far as I recall, can all be found in MacRoman and may be typed using the standard Mac U.S. keyboard layout. In other words, Apple is telling you to use only ASCII characters and the character set or encoding of the problematic characters is actually irrelevant.
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Chris Page - Computer Professional
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein