Unbelievably Bad Web Password Security

I was shocked today because I had two very strange but similar experiences with passwords. Both involved accounts with online web sites/services, and both involved some pretty fundamentally bad password limitations. I'm half tempted to name the sites here but elected to contact them privately about the issues. What were the issues?

Absurd limitations in user account passwords. The first site would not allow a user password longer than 10 characters. Ah... last I heard, longer passwords (to some extent) are generally better, as long as other policies like requiring caps and numbers mixed in. All of these, including password length, help against brute force attacks. The second site did not allow special characters in the password. Adding a special character here or there is another common method of making passwords more difficult to crack. I just found it strange to run into two sites with such odd password limitations.

Wikipedia has some good information on basic password security. I hope it can be of help to the sites I visited today.