So silly
I was doing some online shopping at a site I haven’t used before, but I figured I might again in the future, so I went ahead and set up an account.
Part of that process involved setting up a security question/answer in case I forget my password or something. I chose the first of the pre-selected questions: “What’s the name of the city in which you were born?”
I put in my answer, submitted my account info, and found it summarily rejected. Apparently only answers of 6-12 letters are allowed. Um…I don’t see Ames getting any longer any time soon. Okay, fine. I moved onto the next security question: “What is your mother’s middle name?” Normally this kind of process asks for one’s mother’s maiden name, which would have fit the criteria, but again, Ann didn’t make the cut. Nor did the next question: “What is your father’s middle name?” Dean = NOT ALLOWED.
All the other questions were these ambiguous things, like “What’s the last name of your favorite author?” How on earth am I supposed to decide? I like all kinds of authors. If pressed, I’d probably say Hemingway, but I like a lot of other authors too. Most of them probably meet the 6-12 letter criterion, but I’d be likely to get it wrong because I’d be in more of a Garcia Marquez mood that day. And, never mind, Garcia Marquez is 13 letters, so he’s out too.
Another option was “What’s your pet’s name?” I don’t have any pets.
I finally found one that sort of worked, but let me tell you, I’m a lot more likely to forget the answer to that question than I am my password.
I hope that site had something you really, really wanted. What a pain in the arse. PLEASE LET ME GIVE YOU MY MONEY!!
Hey, what about Houdini?
…not to mention Sir Isaac Newt, FlipFin, Baxter Clarke and Butthead.
Those are all good suggestions, Mub, but that’s just the problem–how would I remember which pet’s name I chose?
I’ll tell you what I did at another site:
I chose the Pet’s name question, but as the answer I didn’t wrote my pet’s name, I wrote one of my relatives’ one ;P.
I did it because if someone want to know my password, he/she maybe knows my pet’s name, but he/she will never know whom is the name.
Greetings from Spain!
Waterlord – I’ve done the same thing – made up my mom’s maiden name and so on… But like Aprille said, then you have to remember that and sometimes that is harder to remember than the original password. I bought something online the other day and they didn’t allow your NAME to be 3 letters or less. What if your parents named you Ed? Not Edward, just Ed?
Well, I did it at two sites. And only at that sites I chose the Pet’s name question with my relative’s name answer. So there is only one answer.
By the way, I chose her “short name” because her name has 20 letters and with the space, 21 XDD. (Hey Hackers, now you know that the answer is a girl’s name)^_^
The boring, other half of my life is spent largely as a computer software designer. This kind of making-the-computer-do-your-thinking-for-you galls me. I send back all sorts of things my programmers send to me and tell them to make it less rigid.
I learned this the hard way in one valuable (and somewhat funny) lesson. It was a software program for a hospital which allowed maternity ward employees to enter patient data. One of the programmers put in a data entry edit that the patient could not be less than 13 years old. Wouldn’t you know, in less than a year they had a 12 year old give birth. (This was the inner city and please don’t clog up Aprille’s blog with endless comments about the sad state of our society. Everyone knows already.)
So the edit was “fixed” to say that patients could not be less than 12 years old. Less than six months later they had a girl who was 11 years and 10 months old give birth!
An extreme example of the dangers inherent when we stop doing our own thinking and delegate that task to a machine.
Jeff: What was the point of that edit in the first place? Just wondering…. Cut down on erroneous entries?
Yes the supposed point was to put a sanity check at the point of data entry and cut down on erroneous data. The lesson I learned (and have applied ever since) was that it’s okay to check data and pop up a warning if your program’s logic thinks it’s questionable, but give users some form of ability to override the edit. Never make it impossible to put in valid data just because some programmer, at some point in the past, thought it didn’t make sense.
In the case of an ecommerce web site, I would put it even more strongly: Don’t irritate the people who are trying to give you money.
According to Facebook, you don’t get Hemingway because you’re a lady. But I’m sure you do.
I’d have to go with the native city question, because my mom’s maiden name is Fisk, my dad’s middle name is Kirk, and my cat is named Sam.
I know what you mean. I recently got frozen out of my banking info because I didn’t know the name of my favorite artist. There are so many!
These sites drive me insane. I’ve had the Ames problem myself (how appropriate that I eventually became a Cyclone) but the one that really drives me crazy is when I get a snarky messages that my password must have letters AND numbers, or must be 8 characters long, or that it seemed like it might easily be guessed. What’s the purpose of the password – be so arcane I can’t remember it or be useful when I want to check my account? I’m starting to look forward to a future where webcams can do a retina scan.