VKontakte.ru - Password recovery, but is it just that ?!

Maybe somewhere it was described, but did not begin to look, and started immediately to the case ... ... to recover the password on the website VKontakte.ru
The essence of this topic is the question "why so?". Why <turns to & lt;

A bit of prehistory.
The affair seemed to be simple, the familiar was upset that she could not log in to the contact, wrote that the password did not work, and that a completely different password was sent to the request "forgot the password", not what she had.
I thought it was hacked as usual (most likely I was right because the old password was russia =)).

And so they sent her a password (pa & lt; ss & gt; word) ° - everything seems to be normal, but this is at first glance. When you enter the site did not start.
As a last resort, I checked the “password recovery” at my login name and was strangely surprised. For the place of the symbol "!" i got a " & # 33;"
Visually looking at the familiar password, I saw the word “password” in it, but with additional characters. Such as " & lt;" and " & gt;" a little googling I found a couple of articles, but rather these characters in the article titles, these turned out to be ordinary angle brackets "<" and ">".
This is how a completely different password turned out than sent a contact - (pa < ss> word). But what a degree sign at the end of the password remained for some time a mystery.
Realizing that the server sends so to speak passwords with a bit encoding, I began to select this symbol of degrees. after 2 hours of picking and poking at the “forgotten password?” I found this symbol and it turned out to be a sign ®.
And in the end we get:
')
(pa & lt; ss & gt; word) ° - password sent by the server.
(pa < ss> word) ® is the real password to enter.

The question is whether it is possible to disable automatic character conversion ???

Thanks for answers!

PS Writing this article is faced with the same property of the system.