Got a message this morning on my phone, maybe from my phone, that I confirmed on my computer.
Some Passwords Compromised!
I’ve seen the message before, and like most folks I ignored it!
For some reason, this morning I actually looked at the message and the passwords that it claimed were compromised.
A lot of the compromised passwords have come about because I’ve merged the other half’s passwords into my passwords. It makes keeping things running a lot easier to have it all on one computer rather than bouncing between two machines.
The list was long… Some of it was easy to negotiate because there were duplicate logins. Once those were sorted out, then it was down to the business of changing compromised passwords. And here’s where things just go right off the damn rails!
I log into a site. Figure out where the hell the site has hidden change password. Account, Profiles, Client Access, security, or whatever other clever euphemism the company chose to use. It’s mildly annoying but navigable.
I get to the change password option and things get super annoying! Enter the old password, then enter the new desired password, twice.
“WRONG! You didn’t include the right kinds of characters, or the right number of special characters, or not enough upper case characters, or numeric characters, the password isn’t as long as War and Peace, that password is too long, 4 characters in the entered password have been used before on this account, or, or, or, or…”
The annoying thing about this is there is almost never any description of what these assholes want, prior to making the first mistake.
I’ve gotten to the point that I’ll hit the submit button just to generate the error that describes what format is necessary for a password.
Because I’m so often annoyed by this irritating bullshit, I use the internal password generator provided by Apple. The down side to this is sometimes even the Apple system can’t generate something useable, but it stores what it generates almost instantly. Meaning that if the generated password is rejected, you may have a bad password stored in the autofill system and then you get to fight with both the password manager AND the asinine website.
This is how I end up with passwords or pass phrases that would make Marines blush.
This morning I was entirely surprised when I ended up in one of these circular password situations and resorted to using an obscenity.
Low and behold, the website told me that such words were offensive and couldn’t be used as passwords.
WTF?
Who the hell are you to tell me what words I can and can’t use for passwords? Furthermore what does it matter? The passwords aren’t supposed to be stored on the site in plain text. They’re supposed to be encrypted. No human is supposed to be able to read the passwords and therefore no human risks being offended. Are we dealing with computers now being offended?
I’d rail and complain except I find myself caring less & less. This particular vendor, service provider, will not matter to me soon. Once I’m out of California I’ll be purging a ton of passwords, and phone numbers from my systems.
I’m actually looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to having a new phone number and a new address.
I’m also rethinking the whole web access thing, across the board. I’d prefer to have everything mailed to my address. I’d like to get things in my mailbox. Maybe , I’ll be able to step back 50 years. I might start writing checks and mailing them to utilities. Then I won’t have to deal with passwords, PINS, and poorly designed websites.
Who knows? I might even have the Sunday paper tossed on my porch instead of reading it on my pad.
Is this a function of age? Or is this my rejection of increasing complexity to do the simplest things?
Perhaps it’s both!
There’s a lot to be said for de-computerization. You’d have to really know me or be looking at that sentence through my eyes to grasp the full irony.
I wonder if the Amish would be willing to teach me how to live simply?
Not only are they trying to raise the rates excessively. (What else is new?) But they’ve got this stupid system where you can’t use their web site to change anything except your email address. Oh, and using their website requires that you submit to paperless billing.
I’m happy about the Speaker because he seems untainted by the rampant corruption in Washington. Time will tell. I do really like the thought of him whipping Congress into working something like real business hours instead of what we’ve been seeing. We’ll never get our money’s worth out of Congress. That’s a given, but maybe this new guy will put an end to Congress sitting around jerking off instead of passing budgets, laws, and finding ways to cut the obscene waste our government finds all too easy to create.
Yesterday Apple released a lot of software.
This morning I got up as usual. I let the dog out, got a cup of coffee, and woke the computer to check email.
Other times they don’t!
A simple example would be the AI deciding to present information on a display that was dark gray on a black screen for the sake of saving energy. Think of an OLED screen where you might only need to turn on the elements in use instead of firing up every element in the display. Keeping the used elements very dim would really be saving energy.
Automated testing is great, but eliminates the human element. That means, that human things like information on a display can be overlooked in testing, and yet the automated tests passed with flying colors.
Hmm another defect just popped out at me.
It may sound like I”m bashing on Apple. I’m not intentionally.