Comments on: Yahoo?

By: Tony Guntharp

Tony Guntharp — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:18:44 +0000

They ALREADY are like the phone companies.

By: Jeremy C

Jeremy C — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:04:54 +0000

This same exact scenario happened to me, with Yahoo’s email, about six months ago. All of a sudden, my password no longer worked. There’s only so many times you can tell yourself, “Maybe I fat-fingered, let me try it once more.” After three days it became very serious as I too had critical data stored on their servers. It made me feel extremely helpless. I went through the same routine of them not having the correct zip code on file and me trying to convince them via email and phone that I was me and to give me back my email account. Well after some spirited back and forths, my old password suddenly started working. All I can say is that Yahoo finally admitted their system was experiencing problems and they were sorry for the inconvenience. Sorry is kinda scary, Yahoo. Best of luck to your friend to get his email back.

By: Kevin Mark

Kevin Mark — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:56:05 +0000

As people start to rely upon services that store a digital identity(cell phone, online banking, email providers), if for what ever reason their real world identity does not match their digital identity this is the result. The digital identity can be altered by a random data error on storage or human error usually through bad typing. Once this discrepency occurs, the company will assume for all legal purposes that the borked digitial id is correct. And now the question is how to fix it. And as this example shows, by the time you notice it, its too late because you usually need this situation corrected ‘yesterday’. I had signed up for a cell phone account and was supposed to provide some hand written document with personal info. I did and then some months later, I wanted to access my online account which used this personal info as a password. It seems they read incorrectly or mistyped the info and then I had to figure out what they had entered to get the account access. It was confusing to give what I thought was the real world answer only to be told it didn’t match the digitial id answer. Maybe the people in belgum have an idea – government issued id’s with digital component. That would seem a better way(not perfect) to verify a user. As with things digital, there is always a way to exploit it. As to your friends dilemma, Yahoo only knows a few identifiable facts about him, other then those facts how do they ‘know’ him. There is no f2f interaction like is possible with real world businesses. If he showed up on yahoo’s door, how would he prove himslelf, dna, blood type test, eye color? Maybe he could email someone the entire contents of his yahoo account on this computer as proof that he had access to the account?
Cheers,
Kev

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:41:37 +0000

Kevin,

You are right: It was Leslie Lamport. Thanks!

-ian

By: Kevin Glynn

Kevin Glynn — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:11:01 +0000

>> (The rhetorical question brings to mind Butler Lampson’s famous >>observation that “a distributed system is one in which the failure of a >>computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer >>unusable”.) google seems to think this is actually due to Leslie Lamport

By: dwp

dwp — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 20:16:26 +0000

I was a corporate lawyer during the last boom and every second client wanted to run an ASP service. I’ve been telling people ad nauseum that the future is in personal storage with everything on it, not networked storage and applications but no one seems to believe me.

Streamed music? Nope, ipod. Backups on the net? No, gi-normous USB keys. Apps over the net? No, notebooks, pocket pc’s and portable suites running off USB keys complete with all settings and data.

What if you lose your portable device? They are so cheap, you go back to your backup at home/office and load up your replacement device again.

My father worked at a major international telecom supplier his whole life and he still has nightmares about the client/server/mainframe setups they had. Is it really happening all over again? Thbbbbt!

By: Russ

Russ — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 19:45:30 +0000

Sorry, make that 1000 friends

By: Russ

Russ — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 19:45:05 +0000

Just get 100 friends from the community, and have them each call 10 times, each time with a different zip.

Brute force.