It's interesting that codes for the Nintendo eShop have certain similar looking characters blocked off even in the keyboard you use to input. That way there's no question even if it's a zero or the letter O for example.

The Windows product keys are encoded in base24 using the alphabet BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789, no doubt chosen to avoid ambiguities (e.g. 5 and S, 1 and I, O and 0), but unfortunately the B and 8 confusion remains.

Interesting. I've not thought about this before, but it seems at first glance a rather inconsistent set.

Resolved by removing both: O and 0; I and 1 and L (l); S and 5.

Resolved by removing the letter: Z and 2; A and 4.

Not resolved: B and 8; G and 6.

I wonder if it was just a quick idea someone had, or if there is some research behind it.

Why did they remove E? Can't easily be confused with 3, I think.

Maybe they removed the vowels so that a randomly generated key doesn’t have any unexpected words in it?

Too bad this was not written near the keys.

Or, well, I don't know if it would be very useful to write there either. At least not on that font.

Thanks for the neologism! Regardless of which font it is rendered in, it is clear from the context that the third character is the number 8 and not the letter B.

I saw a custom license plate a few months ago that was A8C0EF6 which, if not reading carefully, looked just like ABCDEFG