Don’t underestimate the ingenuity of an annoyed user

On November 29, 2016 in the Shark Tank blog at Computerworld there was an amusing story titled Never EVER underestimate an irritated user.

A large manufacturer had proclaimed a new security policy - all computer screens will lock up after 15 minutes with no activity. Then users had to log back in again - with their passwords that had to be changed frequently.

"An employee on the factory floor was very irritated by this change, and devised a system so that his computer would never lock.

He turned his optical mouse upside down so that the sensor was facing up. Then he hung a rag over the mouse, and positioned a fan to blow at the rag.

That way, there was always mouse activity on the computer -- and he never had to key in his password to gain access to the computer during his shift."

A bad way to make passwords secure

On November 23, 2016 the Computerworld website had a SHARK TANK article with a software horror story titled Now THAT’S password security. It described what a government employee encountered when he tried to login to another agency, as he had to do quarterly. It seemed like he could never remember his password, since he was told it was invalid each time he tried to use it again. 

“Eventually, fish can no longer restrain his engineering urge, and he decides to do some testing to identify the actual problem.

First he attempts a login, and as usual it fails. He goes to the password-reset page, but instead of typing his new password into the input box, he types it into a text file, then copies and pastes it. That way, he knows he'll be inputting exactly the same password every time.

Then he immediately logs out and tries to log back in by pasting in the password. And as before, the new password fails.
 
Fish tries several more times, and it keeps failing -- even though it's the same pasted password every time.
 
Clearly, it's help desk time. Fish makes the call, and after several rounds of debugging and testing, there's finally a clear answer: The passwords that fish is creating when his account is reset are all too long.
 
‘But instead of failing, the reset system simply chopped off the extra characters and saved the result’ fish says. So my password of ABC=12345 became ABC=12. But on the password-setting page, there was no mention of a maximum length, and no error message for a too-long password.
 
And a year later, now that they're aware of the problem, there's still no error message, and no warning of a maximum password length. I guess it's more efficient to have users create a new password every time they log in than it is to tell them what a valid password is.”

The image of an Xacto paper cutter was derived from one at Wikimedia Commons.

Please don’t change the defaults on my web software without asking me

I have an ancient free Hotmail email account (that Microsoft currently calls Live.com) which I use almost solely for getting a daily Google Alert on the topic of public speaking.    

Recently they changed their Sign In screen to that shown above (recolored to green) - so now I have to enter my email name on one screen, click Next, and then enter my password on another. They used  to have one screen where I could complete logging in by pressing the tab key to go from the email name to the password.

They never asked but also split up my inbox into two categories labeled Focused and Other. Very weirdly they put my daily Google Alert into Other, although it’s where I’m Focused. I looked up how to undo those settings, and reset to a single inbox.

 Even more weird is that when I go to sign out they first show a short menu (above, recolored) which then changes to a longer menu (below, recolored). I don’t look at my email on my phone, so I haven’t figured out if the short menu is for mobile users with small screens.

Improve your public speaking with iUmmm?

One of the sillier iPhone apps is a filler-word counter called iUmmm. If you were looking for an inexpensive stocking-stuffer gift for someone who both has an iPhone and is the Ah-Counter at Toastmasters club meetings, then it may be exactly what you were looking for.

I found a review of it here. The web site for iUmmm shows a screen with room for displaying five filler words at a time. There is an unlimited database for storing both words and events. However, it is not clear whether it would be easy or hard to scroll the list, or to add new filler words while listening to a speech. With a pen and paper it is easy to add new categories as they occur. So, like, you know, I’ll stick with my pen and note pad for now.

How to turn a newspaper column into trash by reformatting

Today the American Reporter, which is an online newspaper, reran an old humor column by Erik Deckers from the week of October 31, 2003. It is titled Just Imagine Them Naked. You can read a correctly formatted version at his Laughing Stock web site. That version has 18 paragraphs.

The American Reporter rerun today turned his column into trash. They left out all the carriage returns and line feeds that formerly had separated it into easy to read short paragraphs. Now it is just one gigantic paragraph - with almost 740 words. Their combination of small type and no paragraphs made it almost unreadable.

Back in April I discussed the Joy of software: what you see may not be what you get. A web publisher should never do this to a writer!

Joy of software: What you see may NOT be what you get

We are all used to software claims that “What you see is what you get.” The long acronym for this feature is WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzi-wig). Of course, often it is not. The definition in Wikipedia waffles by saying that: “content displayed during editing appears VERY SIMILAR to the final output” rather than identical.

Even little things like carriage returns and line feeds can get messed up when you cut and paste from one application to another. Spaces can disappear or extra blank lines can appear. Symbols can be replaced by apparently unrelated ones. Fonts can be replaced by other fonts. When you go from one computer to another, watch out!

For example, if you go look at the March 25, 2009 post by Sims Wyeth on one of the FastCompany blogs about Coaching and Training for Public Speaking and Effective Sales Presentations you will see the following (my italics added to highlight missing spaces):

The FiveDon’ts of Sales Presenting

When transforming your house into a dream home,talk to three architects.

When getting heart surgery to transform thequality of your life, talk to three surgeons.

And to transform your sales presentations intoreally good sales presentations, talk to three consultants.

Those four missing spaces are the digital equivalent to a stutter. They started in March but seem to have gone away in his April 1 post.

Last week Mitch Ross discussed how PowerPoint fonts do not transfer properly from a Mac to a PC. Last year I found out that fonts may not even transfer in PowerPoint 2003 from my desktop PC to my laptop PC. Apparently some uncommonly used fonts like Matisse just never got loaded on my laptop. Microsoft Office was loaded on those machines about a year apart, so I may simply have chosen different options because the laptop had a much smaller hard drive. The moral is to always check your presentation before show time.

I first ran headlong into the font portability problem on word processors back in late 1993. Two colleagues and I were writing a tutorial article for the Society of Automotive Engineers on “Spot Weld Failure Analysis for Accident Reconstruction” (SAE Paper No. 940570).

As senior author I drafted most of it on my PC. Then one of my co-authors drafted the next sections on his Mac. His boss, the third author, read the printed versions of both. Then he added his text, comments, and changes. The boss’s administrative assistant next tried to put everything together into one coherent manuscript on her PC. She was going to have to send it to Detroit as camera-ready copy.

There were 12 equations and a list of 15 symbols with many subscripts. Almost nothing had moved intact from one machine to another. Even the symbol for the constant pi π got changed to another character. We spent several hours going through the manuscript before it finally was ready to print out and mail in.