How To Have Facebook Send Me My Password Without Having To Change It?

When logging into Facebook you write your password that shows up like **** . Suppose someone send you these **** would it be possible to change them back to letters?

• Answer:

  Short answer: Nope. There's no reason why a web text field would be required to keep a visible representation of the things you typed; password fields store non-characters instead and don't respond to copy commands. Long answer: Let's start at the beginning. What happens when you type a letter? If I type 'q', I am pressing a button on my computer, which sends a signal to the motherboard, which sends a different signal to the processing units of your computer. Your computer has some programs called drivers that allow it to interpret this signal as 'a key press of the letter q'. Depending on what things on your computer are looking for keyboard input, that key press will get passed in as an input with which it can do whatever it pleases. If you were playing Snake and you hit the up arrow, the game would probably see an up arrow press and run the 'switch to moving up' function as it continues its loop of moving your snake one unit and checking to see if that collided with something. If you typed Ctrl, Alt and Del at the same time on a Windows machine, your OS code would open up Task Manager for you. When you have an Internet browser open, it's just another program running pieces of code related to rendering website, which includes looking up the website code and running that. When you see a username and a password field, that's because the website sent over information about a username box and a password box being rendered and what those boxes should do. The username box seems pretty simple: when you type a letter, it shows it, and when you press the login button, it packages up that username in encrypted format and sends it off to the website to check if it's real or not. However, usually we forget the part that the text we see isn't the direct view of what we're typing in so much as a friendly view into what the box is storing. When you type things, the browser is taking the text it knows about and, based upon where it knows your cursor is and what keys you pressed, it changes the text it's storing. It's then polite enough to show you what that new text is by rendering it. The password field in essence is doing the same thing as the username, except that instead of having the "and show you the text you typed and enable the ability to copy and paste from this textbox", it has a "show as many *s as characters currently stored" function. So it shows you a bunch of dots. It is wholly possible to create a special password field on a website that is actually just showing your password in a stupid font, or that doesn't show any characters or changes in the box as you type but still stores your password, or that sends the series of keypresses you made into that box directly to a webserver. It's also possible for your browser to have code in it that also stores the things you type (otherwise, how could it remember your username and password for you?) And it's totally possible that you could accidentally put something on your computer that runs an application that keeps track of what your other applications are doing and figures out when you're typing in passwords and what keys you hit. It's all about what pieces of code have access to what signals. But on a normal website on a normal browser, like Facebook on Firefox, a password field is very intentionally nothing but a pretty rendering of some dots and a cursor corresponding in position to what you've been typing. It's not a data storage mechanism and copying and pasting it won't get the characters (in fact, it usually doesn't support copy at all; just paste). It's just there for the same reason loading bars, beeps when you press buttons, and vibration feedback on a touchpad's keyboard are there: so you can see that it noticed you typing characters and did something with them.