"Further, as groups of characters are typed, the images on the dialog change to distract the would-be onlooker from observing the number of (extraneous) characters typed. "

Actually, the hieroglyphics are just another dubious security feature. The theory is that you know what the hieroglyphics are for the correct password, and if they aren't shown, the login box is being spoofed. In reality, this is dumb, since any regular Notes user just tunes out that part of the login box.

If someone could memorize your hieroglyphics, does that mean they could perform an offline attack at guessing your password?

Hell, even if they only memorized the first few sequences, they would know how your password starts.

Presumably the hieroglyphics are generated based off a hash of what you're typing, so there will not be a one-to-one mapping of hieroglyphics back to data typed. Also, since the hieroglyphics are nonsensical and change quickly, you would probably find it easier to watch their physical keystrokes then trying to memorizing a stream of symbols.

That said, all logical bets are off when analyzing a hare-brained feature like this.

In the current implementation, it doesn't show them until after you type the fifth character, to prevent exactly this kind of attack.

They also replaced the hieroglyphics with a key chain, which implies that at some point someone actually redesigned this wacky features.

Wow this is great stuff.

I remember I had to use Lotusnotes with its main language set as Hebrew.

That meant everything on the screen was "flipped" and since I was not 100% up to speed on the language- for the first little while it was nearly incomprehensible. Even as I improved reading, the software still seemed clunky and it was a pain to perform basic tasks.

I always imagine that someone who can't read the language on the screen could muscle their way through and "figure it out" and become proficient on a product with a well designed ui/ux.