Blizza Blizza

Signing up for online access to Consumer Reports…

Why bother telling people passwords are case-sensitive if you only allow them to use all-lower-case letters in the passwords? Besides decreasing security (it cuts the number of characters required to guess the password roughly in half), it’s pointless — there’s no technical reason for forcing passwords to be all lower-case while simultaneously using case-sensitive comparison routines when checking them for accuracy.

OK, so I fixed that…and was promptly greeted with this:

Aside from the idiocy of telling the user the password is invalid before telling them the username is also invalid, it’s bad UI to present errors piecemeal like this. If there are multiple invalid parts of a submission, you should be telling your users all at once, so they can fix it all at once, rather than making them click multiple times and becoming increasingly frustrated each time. (I believe my exact exclamation after I was presented with this was “You dumb motherf*ckers!”)

WWMT again, this time with a mystery headline:

Broncos Roll, West sets NCAA Record

Go on, read the story. I’ll wait.

While I’m waiting, I’ll sit here repeating “who what when where why how” as a mantra.

OK, you’re back? Great.

Who? Brandon West.
What? Set an NCAA record.

The obvious follow-up question, one that I’m sure all the readers want to know the answer to, is, “What record did Brandon West break?”

Is that in the story anywhere? Of course not.

In what is easily one of the top five best local news stories of the year, a man has been arrested for trying to steal a hemostat from a hospital “to pluck [his] nose hairs”.

Police have also released a mug shot.

ABC News is running a nice little scaremongering piece which they say “call[s] into question the ability of the FAA and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) to detect and purge high risk individuals from the list of approved pilots”. Ooh! High-risk! There are pilots out there who could kill you! Cower in fear!

Oh, wait. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Adobe’s public bug-tracking database URL (emphasis added):

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Bonus security fail: the confirmation e-mail contains your password in plaintext.

A thus-far-anonymous motorcyclist from the burgeoning metropolis of Quincy, Michigan is in custody — and the hospital — this evening after losing control of his (are you ready for this?) unregistered and uninsured motorcycle that he was riding without a helmet or motorcycle endorsement on a suspended license…while drunk.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Seriously, what is it about air travel that makes people check their brains the moment they step through security? I meant to post this when it happened — at the end of June — but I forgot. This happened on a STL-BNA flight. The “artist” was a four- or five-year-old kid accompanied by his(?) mother, who had to have noticed what was going on:

(Click to enlarge.)

That’s crayon. Here’s a tip: crayon doesn’t come off airplane interior paneling any more easily than it comes off your walls at home.

From The New York Times:

Orly Taitz, a California dentist and lawyer who is among the leading voices in the anti-Obama movement, made her case in a combative interview on MSNBC.

“Obama is completely illegitimate as a U.S. president for two reasons — not only because he did not provide the place of his birth, but also because both parents have to be U.S. citizens,” Ms. Taitz said.

Ms. — and I use that term loosely — Taitz is, of course, completely wrong. Not only was Mr. Obama born in Hawaii, but parentage has nothing to do with it (and if it did, a large number of our Presidents would have been ineligible!).

Bill Maher on the so-called “Birthers” movement:

Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won’t take anything on faith?

(via thepunkguy)

Despite my earlier promise to remove WWMT from my RSS feeds due to their continued incompetence in the “actually communicating things in English” department, I haven’t yet gotten around to it, and so this morning, I — along with their four other feed readers — was treated to this gem:

Just don’t run the hen house as too much of a democracy, or Chè the Hen will lead a coup against you and the chickens will run their own hen house, thankyouverymuch.

Further adding to the confusion (or humour value, depending on whether you find this endlessly frustrating or hilarious) is the fact that they got the word “coop” correct later in the article.