Memorable passwords
I really appreciate the password manager! But one thing bothers me is that when choosing memorable passwords, they are only offered in English and are not available in any other language. It is very difficult for someone who does not speak the English or American mother tongue to remember this password for the password manager, for example generated with 4 or 6 words. Surely it should be possible to generate these passwords in the respective language of the country or have I overlooked a setting?
Thanks for the answer!
Greetings from Gruber Johann.
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Comments
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Hi @Johann_Gruber!
At the moment, the word list generator only offers words in English, you are right. The biggest challenge with adding multiple languages is that it's not easy to understand what words should be banned in each language. I can tell you that it's already quite difficult to maintain a clean word list in English, since certain words can have different meanings when taken out of context, or depending on the background of the person reading it.
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Hello ag_ana,
Thank you for the quick reply: I have to contradict you on one point, because there is indeed an edition in German, namely your advertisement for the password manager: I have this advertisement in the Chromebrowser, which gives me these "memorable passwords" in the German language, because I have set the setting in the browser to translate from English to German and that works great!
And from precisely this, your advertisement, I used my memorable passwords for my subscription-based password manager !!
Maybe this is a little food for thought!Greetings
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I have to contradict you on one point, because there is indeed an edition in German, namely your advertisement for the password manager: I have this advertisement in the Chromebrowser, which gives me these "memorable passwords" in the German language, because I have set the setting in the browser to translate from English to German and that works great!
I am not sure this is coming from 1Password, but I would like to confirm. Would you be able to post a screenshot of this?
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Please give me your email address so that I can send you a screenshot.
Greetings
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You can use support+forum@agilebits.com :+1:
After you have sent the email, please feel free to post the ticket number you received so we can locate your message and connect it with this forum discussion.
Looking forward to your message!
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ag_ana
[#GDE-32793-292]
Greetings
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Thank you! I have located your screenshot in the system. I see that you are referring to our online password generator which you can find on our website. As you can see, the password generator only offers words in English: as you said, it's your browser who is translating the words, not 1Password. Currently 1Password only has English words in the password generator :+1:
Example even when you visit our German site:
As you can see, the suggested password still uses English words, so it's your browser which is translating them to German.
ref: GDE-32793-292
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hello ag_ana,
Thanks for the answer. But as you can see, the words are translated by the browser. And that works. So password X, which is on Chrome, could also translate the words into German in the password generator, or am I wrong?
Please excuse my ignorance in this matter.
Greetings0 -
1Password could certainly do that, but it would not solve the underlying challenge I mentioned in my first reply to you. The problem is not a technical one, but rather that different languages would require a different list of words because of the way they could be interpreted. So this would require maintaining a separate list of words, simply translating from English to another language automatically would risk offering words that are offensive or in general not suitable in the second language.
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Hello ag_ana,
Thanks for the clarification. From this perspective, of course, I did not consider that the translation could result in inappropriate words. It should only be a suggestion on my part!
Nevertheless, many thanks for your answers.
Greetings from Gruber Johann0 -
Thank you for the feedback @Johann_Gruber! :)
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Hey ag_ana,
Thanks for your answers.
In addition, I would like to add that to this day I have not found a single suggestive or inappropriate word on this page - and have sent you this screenshot via email - or have noticed !!! Perhaps it is also because "German" is set as the language on my Mac? So if it were only about translations into German, meaningless words would probably not be noticed, but which are absolutely in no way recognizable. So in my opinion it must be something else. Can not imagine it differently!Many greetings
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I can appreciate that, @Johann_Gruber. And thanks again for the suggestion. Ana and I will be happy to discuss it with the development team. :+1:
Ben
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@Johann_Gruber, I wanted to add that we've looked into this a couple of times over the years. And I would like to ask your opinion as a German speaker about a couple of things.
Telegraphic notation
Would you be happy with sticking to seven bit US-ASCII for German words? And would the conventions that were used for telegraphs be acceptable. So instead of, say, a getting a word like "Lösung", would "loesung" be ok?
As much as it would be nice to support a broader range of characters, there is a problem with non-normalized Unicode. There are several distinct byte sequences that can get you "Lösung", and those can vary by what keyboard you use. And until sites and services that accept such passwords handle that problem, we really don't want to be generating passwords with such characters.
Capitalization
For generated passwords based on German wordlists, should be capitalize nouns and adjectives? That is, following the example from above, would it be "loesung" or "Loesung"? Note that we may wish to add to the generator the ability to randomly capitalize some words, and it would mess up the math for calculating strength if some words on the list were inherently capitalized.
Word length
We chose to limit the length of the individual words that we use in English to eight characters. This way a four word password will be at most 35 characters long ( 4 * 8 plus 3 separators). I haven't run statistics on the length of German words (particularly if we do things like change "ö" to "oe" and "ü" to "ue"), but I'm confident that we may not be able to get a reasonable upper bound on the length of passwords. Of course, I would also have to check the number of words that are eight characters or fewer.
There are a few other things that complicate using non-English. One of them, as @ag_ana pointed out, is that we need to have enough people around who are fluent in how the language is used to help us weed out offensive words. We do have a number of native German speakers working at 1Password, but we have for more English speakers, and we've been able to find lists of taboo words and have manually culled others from our word list as we notice things. I'm not sure that we are confident to do that for languages which we are less familiar with.
Translating won't work
Ana also pointed out that simple translation isn't going to work. First of all because of length constraints. Some translations will have to be excluded because they result in things that are too long. Another thing is that translations will map funny. Would English "safe" and English "secure" translate to different words in German? (I don't read German, but from the little I've seen, "sicher" appears to be used for both. But even if that isn't a good example, there will be others.)
Translations also become difficult because our word list, in order to have lots of words, eight characters or fewer, contains a lot of obscure words. In a demo once, it spat up "yclept", which really isn't an English word at all, but it is a Middle English word. (I haven't removed it from the list because it really is ok for there to be some very unfamiliar words.) Do we want to look for an archaic German word for "named" or "called" (which is what "yclept" meant in Middle English.)
Other sources
We've also looked at the Peer.io wordlists. They did a fantastic job at constructing them, but the lists are too short for our purposes. If we used those lists, we would need to have more words per passphrase to match the strength of what we have with our list. This isn't a flaw in what they did, it is that their word list passphrases were designed for a different usage, as things that a user would rarely, if ever, need to type in.
None of this is to say that we won't add wordlists from non-English languages. As the above suggests, we have looked into this. It was the plan from the outset, but then we ran into the sorts of problems I've listed above. Perhaps we will come back to it.
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Dear jpgoldberg,
Thanks for your writing.I believe I found the puzzle about the German version in your 1Password advertisement!
The following: I am an older year and not very good at English and therefore discovered some time ago that I can use the Chromebrowser to automatically translate pages in English into German. So it is not surprising that 99% of the recognizable passwords in the advertisement for the 1 password manager (1% in English) only get in the chrome browser !! So far I have not noticed a single suggestive or nasty and insulting word!
I discovered it because the passwords that can be remembered in Safari and Chromebrowser only appear in English.
Hope I have made a significant contribution to this topic.
Would appreciate an answer very much.
Greetings from Gruber Johann
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Indeed, thanks for the thoughtful discussion! I enjoyed reading it, and there's a lot to consider as we continue to work on 1Password going forward. We'll continue to evaluate the options. And I enjoy using Chrome's (and now Safari's) translation features myself too. Cheers! :)
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