Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- From: abcdef <abc@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 05 Mar 2011 14:05:57 GMT
fffurken <fffurken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:3522c78c-d1f7-4c3d-a8f9-
6a55c428a575@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
Why is it you only get 3 tries at entering a pin before your phone
gets blocked or your card gets chewed etc?
There was a time when passwords to bank websites, and other such
websites, were done that way too. Computer programmers aren't
necessarily as intelligent as a lot of people think they are. A lot of
them have Asperger's syndrome, which makes them imtelligent in some areas
and retarded in others. Only after experience with the 3-password-
attempts rule did it come to the attention of enough people to crack down
on such stupidity. But I've encountered websites recently that still
have that rule, or at least still give error messages implying they do.
I think State Farm was one of them, if I remember correctly. You can
make it clear to them how stupid it is by asking them what would happen
if a hacker entered thousands of different login names and a few random
passwords for each. Some hackers write programs to enter such
combinations automatically, and might do millions of them, disabling
thousands of real accounts by coincidence.
Have you noticed how much software is full of stupid bugs, but also does
some things brilliantly? It's the same problem. The programmers with
Asperger's can see the same bugs in operation for years and never realize
there is anything wrong. And the people that run the company often don't
become aware of the bugs because they don't pay attention and/or delegate
such problems to the programmers.
And stupid error messages are the same problem. Error messages that tell
you something is wrong but don't bother to tell you what. Such as when
Microsoft used to say something like "the process can't access the file
because another process is using it" without bothering to mention what
process couldn't access what file because what other process was using
it. They kept that error message in a lot of versions of Windows for a
lot of years because the programmers at Microsoft never really understood
that there was anything wrong with it. And that's just one example of
the same stupidity in huge numbers of error messages in all kinds of
software everywhere.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- From: fffurken
- Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- References:
- Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- From: fffurken
- Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- Prev by Date: Have I mentioned Lada Gaga's latest song recently? Well, duh!
- Next by Date: Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- Previous by thread: Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- Next by thread: Re: Mankind's stupidest invention: The only 3 attempts rule.
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
