Hello, 
Last night I was discussing something with a friend on MSN Messenger.
His English is pretty bad but he's pretty good with computers. Anyway,
I used a gift certificate on a music site while chatting to him, and
on the next page the gift code was shown as XXXXXXXe12, the XXXXXXX
part were the hidden characters. I asked him how can sites do that
without losing the code itself, and he said something in bas English
that I couldn't understand. He also said there's a way to uncover it
using a program called "Aspx Failler"?:S I googled that and found
nothing.

My question is, could someone explain what this program is, and where
to get it? I'd like to see how it works!:)

Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by pinkfreud-ga on 16 May 2005 10:50 PDT

I don't understand what you mean when you say "a way to uncover it"
(in reference to hidden characters). Can you give us a bit more
description of what you're looking for?

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Clarification of Question by adminsurgicalgod-ga on 16 May 2005 14:17 PDT

Well, I don't know if its true or not but he said there's a way to
find out what the hidden characters are. For example, if the code was
XXXXXXXXXXE31 with only the last 3 digits showing, the program would
be able to show you the whole code. It's kinda like reversing what the
website did to encode it.

Dear adminsurgicalgod-ga,

The only way i can explain is, what we can do in programming is to
replace one character with other... like suppose we have..
adminsurgicalgod, we can replace first 12 characters with X and make
it XXXXXXXXXXXXlgod. I dont think using any technique on a webpage we
can see the XXXXXX part of above text.

I dont think if we can convert this back to original on a website, but
if we have some passwords stored in any windows application, we can
reveal then using softwares like iOpus Password Recovery software.

Regards,

Fahad

Are you sure it's impossible to do? Even if the X characters are in a
textbox where they can be edited? I once saw a program that can show
you the password written in a textbox even if it is hidden but I guess
thats a different thing.