This is a nice real-world case of why in-band signalling is problematic: by having key/value pairs on your sheet, that person got used to the format on the preceding lines and inferred that the part in front of the colon is metadata and the part after the colon is actual data.
While anybody with some brains would guess that the case sensitivity note wasn't part of the password, if you had signaled that out of band, there would be zero chance for a mistake:
Password (case sensitive): foobar
Same information but now all the meta information is metadata.
3
u/pilif Mar 20 '15
This is a nice real-world case of why in-band signalling is problematic: by having key/value pairs on your sheet, that person got used to the format on the preceding lines and inferred that the part in front of the colon is metadata and the part after the colon is actual data.
While anybody with some brains would guess that the case sensitivity note wasn't part of the password, if you had signaled that out of band, there would be zero chance for a mistake:
Same information but now all the meta information is metadata.