Raging into the void

The internet is dead.

Posted on October 27, 2008 4 min read

That’s it people, the internet is no longer useful, we might as just stop the whole thing now and shut it down. We can use the soon to be empty internet tubes to pipe maple syrup into everyone’s home to facilitate tastier pancakes for all.

The reasoning behind this decision is simple, the internet has been written by blistering imbeciles, and yes I know I write bits of it, but like all useless systems there are a few nuggets of marvel to be had. Sadly not enough to make up for the crap.

In an ongoing tale of woe with my new Barclaycard I tried to sign up to their online website thingie so I could do all the things I did on the old website, quite why I needed to sign up again I’m not sure, surely they could just transfer my data from old site to new? Oh no wait it would seem that their log-in detail requirements are so stupid that it would not be possible at all unless the previous site had also been designed by an undereducated technophobic screech owl.

Firstly they don’t let you choose your username but assign you a random collections of numbers meaning I’ll probably have to write that down to stand any chance of remembering it. Secondly they limit my password to 6 characters, that must be numbers. Why? If I want a 23 character mixed case, mixed character password, surely, you should let me, I will be the one to decide how secure to make things. By all means have some kind of minimum requirements to prevent the simpering idiots out there having a password of ‘password’ or ‘gandalf’. But 6 numbers, that does not strike me as very secure at all.

Next we get to the memorable word, oh that should be easy there are lots of nice words I can remember, pericombobulation, sesquipedalian and angioplasty are some. Alas these are no good, no, for they are not secure. Apparently only words 6-8 characters long are secure enough to prevent Derick and Akin, the only surviving children of late Mr. Mrs Rasheed, a highly reputable business magnet (a cocoa merchant) who operate during his days in Nigeria, from getting into my account.

Sadly there are really quite lot of 6-8 character words, how will I remember which one I picked?!?!? JOY, RAPTURE, ECSTASY there is a memorable word reminder field which should be a “phrase or question that will remind only you of your memorable word in case you forget it”!

Great, this’ll be easy, I’ll just craft a sentence that will help me out when the mind finally succumbs to the onslaught of port and loses it’s way… Wait what’s this, I can only use 21 characters, what kind of fucking reminder can I fit into that… I’m just thankful I don’t speak welsh at this point.

I finally do manage to register, but the combination of random username, password and meaningless memorable words means that I will have to write this down somewhere, I’m not getting any younger and senility might hit at any moment.

The more cynical part of my mind (all of it) might wonder if they are doing this on purpose so they can deny any compensation claim for stolen funds, if you write down your details and they are “stolen” I’m pretty sure they would claim you lose the right to getting your money back.