back to article You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Twitter says a bug in macOS 10.15.1 aka Catalina stops users of the social network's desktop Mac app from entering certain letters in account password fields. When attempting to type their passwords into the application to log in, some characters are ignored, specifically 'b', 'l', 'm', 'r', and 't'. That would make it …

  1. Sierpinski
    Trollface

    Clearly meant to stop people from typing tumblr

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Or "Baltimore"...

    2. Tigra 07
      Coat

      RE: sierpinkski

      They can still have the password "apple.sucks1"

      1. Anomalous Custard

        Re: RE: sierpinkski

        It would have to be "app1e.sucks1" as L is affected too

        1. Tigra 07
          Facepalm

          Re: RE: sierpinkski

          Bugger...You're correct...

    3. detuur
      Holmes

      or retweeting Black Lives Matter posts

    4. eswan

      Steve Ballmer

    5. Benchops

      We, I fo one can' see any poe wih his. Who uses hose ees anyway?

      Missing consonans ound, anyone?

  2. Danny 2

    Win10 'upgrade'

    One of the first Windows 10 upgrades disabled six keys on my mum's HP laptop. My first thought was she'd spilled liquid on it, but the keys weren't located next to each other so the update was the next most obvious culprit. I updated the drivers from HP to no effect. Luckily all the keys needed for my password worked, though I had to teach her how to cut and paste characters, which is obviously a pain. I was just about to strip and clean the machine when the next update came, and hey presto, all the keys worked again.

  3. tcmonkey
    Thumb Up

    Hahahahahaha!

    At least they can still type their amusement!

    1. caffeine addict

      Well, "hei auseen", anyway...

    2. macjules

      Bit of an embuggerance if your name is Bloomberg I guess.

      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        Coat

        oo-erg missus.

      2. FrogsAndChips Silver badge

        Only if your password is your name.

        1. JJKing

          Only if your password is your name.

          Isn't that a line from the movie Sneakers?

  4. bpfh

    So...

    It’s “ wi e “ then...

  5. el kabong

    What a fiasco. Priceless!

    I trust The Register to provide an update should they hear anything from the vendor. I'll be on alert.

    1. Dr. Mouse

      Re: What a fiasco. Priceless!

      trust The Register to provide an update should they hear anything from the vendor

      Apple, speaking to el'Reg? Have they produced winged hogs?

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
        Pirate

        Re: What a fiasco. Priceless!

        The winged hogs are impounded due to African Swine Fever.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Needs more 'ess'

    Obviously couldn't 'ess' it before it was released

  7. IGotOut Silver badge
    Joke

    Now we know....

    What happened to all of Bill Clinton's Whitehouse staff...

  8. SS2011
    Trollface

    Response from Apple...

    "You're typing it wrong"

    1. caffeine addict

      I mean, that's literally the joke in the headline...

  9. sbt
    Paris Hilton

    It's a stupid bug, but...

    ... surely a quick work-around is to deregister the short-cuts when the login screen is shown?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This bug probably doesn't effect everyone....

    From looking at the letters that are not recognized it appears the password "covfefe" is still viable.

    1. DryBones

      Re: This bug probably doesn't effect everyone....

      Affect

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: This bug probably doesn't effect everyone....

        "Have you tried sex?"

        "No. I hear it has a bug that effects everyone."

        (I know no one will see this, but I couldn't resist.)

  11. Steve Knox
    Joke

    Missed it by that much...

    PS: Apple's fiscal 2019 full-year financial numbers were out on Wednesday: $55bn profit, down seven per cent year-on-year...

    PPS: Apparently that $55 billion profit has been further reduced, and is now $55 iion.

    1. TVU Silver badge

      Re: Missed it by that much...

      PPS: Apparently that $55 billion profit has been further reduced, and is now $55 iion.

      Some of that $55 billion profit quite clearly needs to spent on hiring more quality testing and assurance staff for both software and hardware. They also ought to move to a more sane 2 year new operating system release schedule with bug fixes and updates in between.

  12. Phil Endecott

    Good thing my password is “password”.

    1. seven of five

      Oi! Stop using my password!

      1. blcollier

        I can go one better: the combination for my luggage is 12345.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      " Good thing my password is 'password'. "

      You mean 'passwod'

      If 'E', 'X' and 'I' were also missing it could be seen as a Boris coverup

      1. Tom 7

        Time to ditch the keyboard!

  13. Scott 1
    Gimp

    Who needs it?

    Twitter's nothing but a bunch of rabid howler monkeys hurling metaphorical poo at each other anyway. Maybe Apple is doing us a favor by keeping us out </brainwashed>

    1. chivo243 Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Who needs it?

      I thought twatters only used a mob to twit their shit? Who knew? Who wanted to know?

    2. 404
      Trollface

      Re: Who needs it?

      Good place for trolling.

      Besides, hurling metaphorical poo is scientifical, how else can you see what sticks?

    3. Lazlo Woodbine

      Re: Who needs it?

      I'm certain 90% of Twitter traffic is bots arguing with other bots

    4. N2

      Re: Who needs it?

      nothing but a bunch of rabid howler monkeys hurling metaphorical poo at each other anyway

      Spot on, couldnt have said it better myself.

  14. Graybyrd
    Angel

    Missing letters not missing

    They're really not missing. All are available as optional downloads from the Apple Store.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Missing letters not missing

      But..but...the App Store is requesting my (same) password.

    2. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Missing letters not missing

      Only on a subscription basis, at a very reasonable $7.99 per use.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Missing letters not missing

        Isn't that Microsoft's thing?

      2. fidodogbreath

        Re: Missing letters not missing

        Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to both Keyboard+ and Keychain+ to use "Pro" characters in passwords.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can't loging to Twitter?

    Well done Apple. Smart move!

    Disclaimer

    Anyone purporting to be 'me' on any social media platform is an impostor. I am not (knowingly) a registered user of any of them and never will be.

    1. fidodogbreath

      Re: Can't loging to Twitter?

      Anyone purporting to be 'me' on any social media platform is an impostor. I am not (knowingly) a registered user of any of them and never will be.

      Present company excepted, of course.

  16. Totally not a Cylon

    Basic fault finding

    If it only affects Twitter (why di I want to swap the I for an a?) then it's a Twitter bug.

    If it affects other logins then it's a Catalina bug.

    Plus who still types their password on a Mac anyway?

    1. BigSLitleP

      Re: Basic fault finding

      RTFA

  17. defiler

    From the Windows world

    Can I just poke my head over the fence and say that that's twice now that Windows 10 has disabled my PS2 keyboard port completely after updates?

    Getting most of the keys would be an improvement!

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Re: From the Windows world

      That sucks. Thanks for the headsup, I'm still using an old school Microsoft Natural keyboard at home and I'm unwilling to downgrade for what passes for a keyboard these days

      1. defiler

        Re: From the Windows world

        You can turn it back on again - it's not permanent, just a pain in the arse.

        Regedit:

        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Start = 1

        The updates have been resetting it to 3 because surely nobody has an old keyboard that they're comfortable with...

        Just keep a cheapie USB keyboard kicking about to make the change (or use the on-screen one).

  18. TonyJ

    Steve Jobs

    There was a whole lot to dislike about Steve Jobs, but I can help but think this sort of thing would never have kept appening when he was in charge.

    He was, after all, renowned for being an absolute task master when it came to quality checks as well as being one of the only CEOs known to hold those on the top table wholly responsible for their own departments.

    It isn't, of course, just a curse of Apple.

    It also seems that users- even in the enterprise- have become very tolerant of these repeated problems every time there is an update to an OS or application.

    1. paulf
      Gimp

      Re: Steve Jobs

      I can imagine that, as a Dev at Apple, the risk of Jobs showing up at YOUR desk to have a screaming tantrum discuss a problematic bug he'd identified, then bursting into tears agreeing to review your fix personally while offering constructive feedback certainly kept you focused on making sure things worked. Telling department heads that any major bugs will mean they'll be picking up their bollocks with a dustpan and brush held personally accountable probably also focused minds.

      I guess a visit from "Call me Tim" just doesn't carry the same, ahem, motivational gravitas.

      1. JJKing
        Trollface

        Re: Steve Jobs

        I guess a visit from "Call me Tim" just doesn't carry the same, ahem, motivational gravitas.

        I imagine he just might offer to pick up your bollocks for you.

    2. JamesWRW
      Mushroom

      Re: Steve Jobs

      Well, there was the iTunes 2 installer which nuked volumes with names starting with a space back in 2001.

      1. TonyJ

        Re: Steve Jobs

        I thought it was pretty clear that I wasn't suggesting things were 100% perfect under him or that there weren't misses, just that there generally tended to be far fewer of them and that people at senior levels tended to be held accountable.

        Apologies if that wasn't clear in my initial post.

  19. Paul A Jackson

    Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

    I used to unreservedly recommend colleagues, family and friends to switch to Apple desktops or laptops.

    Since about 2017, no longer.

    Apple simply doesn't care about this market segment any more. It has totally lost the plot.

    Meanwhile, four years ago, Microsoft switched to free upgrades for Windows 10. It is under far less self-imposed pressure to stick to specific release dates.

    Presumably the money it has saved on advertising and marketing new OS names has been and will continue to be substantial, also.

    Moreover, Windows 10 minimum and recommended minimum hardware specifications have not changed, except for minimum drive space being raised to 32GB from 16GB (32 bit) and 20GB (64 bit) - arguably long overdue anyway.

    What Microsoft seems to understand that Apple does not, is that most PC users could not care less about new OS features, functions, bells, whistles and emojis. They are far more concerned.about continuity of experience - not having to relearn new ways of getting the same old applications working and access to the same old OS functions EVERY year.

    And not having the pain of breaking numerous of their trusted applications and having to revert or wait for Apple to pull its finger out and fix bugs.

    Time Apple got new Heads of Mac Marketing and Development at least.

    Current bunch are very bruised and past their sell-by dates!

    1. Dave K

      Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

      I started off agreeing with you until I got to "What Microsoft seems to understand that Apple does not, is that most PC users could not care less about new OS features, functions, bells, whistles and emojis. They are far more concerned.about continuity of experience". Sorry, but that's crud.

      If MS understood that people don't care about new OS features, why does MS insist on *two* feature updates a year when one would be plenty? And if MS cares about continuity of experience, why have they still not finished migrating to "Settings" after *four years*? Windows 10 is full of rough edges and half-finished bodges that MS seems to have forgotten about.

      When it comes to shonky and unfinished updates being shipped out, MS and Apple are as bad as each other. Neither seems to care about the end-user experience of their operating systems any more sadly.

    2. katrinab Silver badge

      Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

      MacOS - You are unable to log into Twitter

      Windows - You have your documents folder deleted

      Obviously neither should happen after an update, but if I was forced to have a choice, I know which one I would pick.

      Also, in Mac, you go to the App Store and "purchase" thre free update if you want it.

      With Windows, it gets forced down your throat whether you want it or not.

      1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
        Gimp

        Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

        Indeed. I've still yet to decide whether or not I'm going to upgrade to Catalina. Windows 10, on the other hand, doesn't give me the option not to, just to "pause updates for 45 days". Gee, how generous...

      2. JJKing
        Linux

        Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

        Obviously neither should happen after an update, but if I was forced to have a choice, I know which one I would pick

        Err, would that choice be a Linux flavour? :-)

      3. Michael Kean

        Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

        Tell that to my customer who lost all her business emails due to the Catalina upgrade IMAP email bug.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

      Wholeheartedly agree. For the many clueless home users obsessed with getting a laptop, I used to point them to Apple without hesitation up to about 2017. The savings in "[insert unpaid tech support's name here] my computers broken again, can you fix it?" alone were well worth it.

      Hardware quality and Op Sys are both regressing at a rate of knots. Butterfly keyboards; (excessive) over-pricing, minimal expansion (if not enforced un-expansion) and negligible repairability - all massive minuses from where they were just 3 years ago. A Macbook Pro was good value not that long ago; when compared to equivalent "premium" PC laptops.

      Got a Mac Mini and Macbook Pro (2017) sat at home at the moment and absolutely no intention to upgrade past 10.14 for the forseeable future. And a Mac Pro G5 quad too, but less said about those the better perhaps.

      With Windows 10 I cannot recommend Windows in any context at all of course, so I am now really stuck between a rock and a hard place. For casual use, I'd mostly point people to an iPad with a keyboard. For any kind of serious application, for all it is end of life, Win7 still has some major plusses. Or OS X 10.14.

      Perhaps unsurprisingly I have shunted most of my personal computing workload onto Linux; and even there the fractured community (particularly in Linux Desktop world) are far from helpful.

      BSD is increasingly looking like it's my future. What a time to be alive for a computer fan - the major platforms are all borked so to find anything half interesting one ends up looking backwards at hardware from the 90's or beyond. Most exciting new computer coming soon is the standalone Vampire!

    4. N2

      Re: Apple's Annual PC OS "Upgrade" Cycle

      They are far more concerned.about continuity of experience

      Well, I suppose MS do make a mess of updates on a regular basis so I can agree with you there.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone would think...

    Apple was looking to release a twitter clone (obv without the profanity, it's Apple).

  21. GordonD

    Who to believe, twitter dev or every other MacOS App.

    The real story here is the press parroting a twitter dev blaming his problems on Apple, when no-one else has the problem.

    Evidence.

    1. twitter, multi-billion dollar company has for a long time claimed they couldn't afford to make a Mac App, so they probably don't have much of a Mac dev department.

    2. No-one else reporting these problems.

    3. UIKeyCommand documentation explicitly says it is for key combos, not single letters. (Quoted at the end of the comment), so this is explicitly not a bug.

    4. Oh, UIKeyCommand, so this is a Catalyst App, which is new in Catalina, so when they say regression, they mean Apple did a bug fix from an early Beta. Bet they didn't enable those single key shortcuts in the iOS App.

    Supporting quote from UIKeyCommand documentation :-

    "Hardware keyboards allow a user to hold down the Control, Option, Command, or other modifier key and press another key in combination to initiate commands such as Cut, Copy, or Paste. You can use instances of this class to define custom command sequences that your app recognizes and then provide an appropriate response."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who to believe, twitter dev or every other MacOS App.

      I think there is enough blame to go around.

      The API docs talk about the use of modifier keys, the API allows for the entry of modifiers, but I'm assuming that the API doesn't force the use of a modifier. (i.e. allows you to create a shortcut without any modifier). Whether this is oversight in development, testing or behaviour that they actually wanted is unclear.

      However they now have at least one customer building an app using a shortcut without modifier, and so they need to work out what the official line is.

      1. Block people creating these.

      2. Make this work in a different way (so you can choose on an element whether it handles the key press or not)

      3. Explain the behaviour so that people wanting shortcuts without modifiers can still use them.

    2. Baldrickk

      Re: Who to believe, twitter dev or every other MacOS App.

      A single character _is_ a sequence, albeit a short one.

      1. D@v3

        Re: Baldrickk

        Reminds me of someone trying to describe a touch screen 'press' as a 'zero length swipe'

        (I believe it was Apple, trying to patent swipes (or something like that) and arguing that presses were included because .....)

        1. Baldrickk

          Re: Baldrickk

          I guess it depends if you treat a string as a collection type or not...

          or maybe it's the difference between defining your shortcut as "a" and ["a"]

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who to believe, twitter dev or every other MacOS App.

      Spot on. The problem I have is that I cannot validate those issues - I do not have them.

      Changing to Catalina beta had some initial pain (the Windows Vista idea of demanding validation of anything that moves in the machine, and Apple went one better by demanding to authorise website downloads). Don't get me wrong, I do like the control (it replicates more or less what Hands Off! was doing) but the changeover should have been a one-off process instead of it showing up every time you start a new app which utterly sinks usability - as I said, a very Vista like approach and even in the System Preferences it has a very unstructured feel to it.

      That said, everything else appears to work, including iOS backups via Finder. That said, I did detect featurism (adding features without a real purpose) - I wish they left the hell alone what just worked or left us at least a way to say "act as before". Ramming ideas down people's throat is a Microsoft trait, Apple used to be helpful in keeping UIs mostly the same between versions. No longer :(.

      Anyway, for me it works after the initial pain.

  22. Baldrickk

    Compared to Vista

    I don't remember Vista stopping me from inputting passwords...

    In fact, I think that the biggest problem Vista had was it's desire to cache as much as possible in memory, which when under-provisioned was less than useful as it would be forced to use the pagefile more than it should need to.

    The root cause of the majority of problems was the HW manufacturers selling machines with 1GB or less of memory. If you gave it 2+, it would run great.

    Say what you want about it, but it was an improvement over XP for me, and unlike Windows 10, it had ONE control panel that worked consistently.

    1. Bogbody

      Vista was fine ... as mentioned above .. with enough RAM. No problems with 4G, ran ok for years. Only stopped using it when win10 came along and I needed to familiarise myself with what was obviously going to be the future.

  23. Tom 7

    Peoples data is a lot more secure if the dont have access to it themselves.

    Until the machine is defenestrated that is!

  24. Paradroid

    Sure it's not the keyboard?

    It'll be hilarious when this gets fixed, but lots of people report that it's still broken. Er, no sir, this time the problem is your butterfly keyboard.

  25. TRT Silver badge

    Gah!

    That stops me from ordering my favourite Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato and Mayo on Rye sandwiches.

  26. holmegm

    Why does a deliberately crippled blog have a desktop application?

  27. dnicholas

    Mac OS

    It just works, seamlessly

    https://youtu.be/qmPq00jelpc

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Butterflies

    It's not a bug. It's just simulating the user experience of their butterfly keyboard.

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