Fedora 19 To Stop Masking Passwords

First time accepted submitter PAjamian writes "Maintainers of the Anaconda installer in Fedora have taken it upon themselves to show passwords in plaintext on the screen as they are entered into the installer. Following on the now recanted statements of security expert Bruce Schneier, Anaconda maintainers have decided that it is not a security risk to show passwords on your screen in the latest Alpha release of Fedora 19. Members of the Fedora community on the Fedora devel mailing list are showing great concern over this change in established security protocols." Note: the change was first reported in the linked thread by Dan Mashal.

Comments

Re:Only in the installer

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hardly something to get up in arms about, unless you regularly re-install your OS in front of a crowd.

Except it only takes once for it to matter.

Do you really expect me to disconnect an employee computer, hull it up to my office, and reinstall there - just so I can have a standard local root password the other admins also know?

Why make me go through all that extra work, effort, and time simply because someone is too lazy to add password masking code that has existed since the 60s?

Let me guess, the installer will also bitch if I type "1234" with the intent to change the password to a real one later using well made software? Seems par for the course here.

All this change does is force me to install from a master base image and remove the option for a normal install in the rare time I need it, which in reality causes me to never use their installer software more than once.
If they only wanted others to not use their software, why don't they just go the easy route and stop trying to write software? It will have the same effect but they will be finished in zero seconds instead of greater than zero seconds :P

In the end, this is just a waste of everything.