I'll follow up on where the non-ASCII characters are coming from. I think is is due to translation, which makes me wonder why it wasn't unicode already.
It seems like it would be appropriate to remove it. I suspect that the thinking when adding it was that you could get a i18n._Message object passed in, but that would actually be an incorrect usage, since the mask_password should be called on the message after it has been translated and the replacement text applied.
I'll follow up on where the non-ASCII characters are coming from. I think is is due to translation, which makes me wonder why it wasn't unicode already.
It seems like it would be appropriate to remove it. I suspect that the thinking when adding it was that you could get a i18n._Message object passed in, but that would actually be an incorrect usage, since the mask_password should be called on the message after it has been translated and the replacement text applied.