AOL has problems, it has for a while now. Starting from a year ago it had a crazy privacy fiasco, flagging business model, and well, another privacy fiasco. AOL doesn’t need anymore flack.

Well, maybe after this.

Apparently, your super secure 16 digit AOL password may not be quite as secure as you believe. AOL.com allows you to enter up to 16 digits as a password, the servers, only read up to the first 8. Thus, password#$#45! is the same as passwordpass. For those few of you that still use AOL, make certain to load up those strong password goodies on the front end — you wouldn’t want anyone to access your precious AOL.com spam box.

This might not be entirely AOL’s fault (it is, but work with me here). This mode of reading passwords is a holdover on many old Unix systems. If the servers are Unix, that may be the source of the problem right there.