Sunday, November 3, 2013

Cryptic Foggy Letters

I haven't logged into my email account in a long time.  I have always accessed my account on my phone or desktop. Today, however, I was logging in using another computer. I tried my password at least eleven times but had forgotten it. I panicked when I could not get in and needed to access it quickly.  I was relieved when I saw this convenient link below the Sign-in bar that asked so friendly 'forgot your password?',  I  thought, "why yes I have forgotten my password and I am so relieved you are here!" With one click I was dragged in by the neck and sent on a wild goose chase through the black hole known as the Internet. Let me just walk you through a bit of a password change process; After typing your email address and the password you "thought" it was, you are taken to white page with a black box that has a blurry cryptic word in foggy black lettering in it. You are asked to type the blurry message underneath. You will not be able to read the word because the font is a melting style that globs the letters together making it almost impossible to see that hidden number. After two failed attempts you are kicked off the page for being a robot or something and a potential security threat. Now, if you are lucky to make it through the foggy cryptic gate, you are then sent to answer a series of security questions. Questions that you at one time made up and gave answers to.  What is your favorite movie of all time? Love Affair I type. Nope. Sense and Sensibility  I type again. I was positive it was that one. (I love the scene on the hill in the rain.) No. It doesn't work.  None of them do. They don't work because I have a new favorite movie every five minutes.  I finally am redirected to another question. Who are you meeting on top of the Empire State building in 2014? Who? Who?? Dear god that is coming up! Fail that test.  After failing miserably at the questions you are then kicked out for being a potential hacker and you try again.  Finally you fight your way through gate after gate, those web pages that don't let you use the back button so you have to retype the search address to get back to where you were, and the three hundred attempts to pick a password that has 8 characters in it, one uppercase letter, 4 lowercase letters all of which are vowels, and must pass the too weak, weak, strong test.  You are finally given a new password via email, so off you go to your mail host website to retrieve your password.  But BEFORE YOU GET YOUR NEW PASSWORD you have to click on the link that sends you to a page that has cryptic foggy letters on it. 

And it begins again. 


0 comments:

Post a Comment