cognoshanty: Scarin' myself on a Monday

January 29, 2007

Scarin' myself on a Monday

From the top item today on the Flickr News page, a good example of why the Internet may be doomed:

-- Make sure that the address locator bar of your browser is visible. If you follow a link anywhere in the site that leads to a page that looks like Flickr but the URL is not flickr.com, please use the Report Abuse form listed in the footer of every page to let us know. We have active filtering and we'd like to review any comment so that we can add new URLs to these filters.

-- Flickr members can only sign in to Flickr on "login.yahoo.com" (excepting "old skool members"). For your own protection, you should review the information available at security.yahoo.com.

When folks as smart as the Flickr bunch have to devote considerable resources to mitigating the effects of the worldwide scriptk underground, and then have to pay lawyers to come up with this drivel to attempt to interact with users about this kind of thing, it makes you wonder what else they might be doing with everything they lose down those two suckiest of sucky zero-accountability drains, damage-control reengineering and damage-control PR. 5% of the web developers out there have enough talent to minimally address the most obvious and well-publicized vulnerabilities and might make it to World One, Level One, Round 2: Sell Your Soul. Another 5% is just lucky. And some 5% have damage-control-fu: always calm, able to consider the next move, motivational flexibity (not to be confused with being a hypocritical swine), no problem getting over getting shat on ("Let me buy us both two new coats and join you for lunch!"), and making the right people want to sleep with you: bingo, baby you've got it made. For the other 85% of us, let's not get into details about their failings.

Atwbsk!

Posted by Erik at January 29, 2007 11:34 PM

Comments

Please translate that into a language people like me can understand. I googled "scriptk" to no avail. It's not even in Wikipedia. Does it mean Flickr has Bugs? I just tried to sign into Flickr but it's too confusing. I gave up. Sorry. Maybe I'm tired or something.

Posted by: Anita at January 30, 2007 09:28 AM

Translations:
I made up scriptk as a more 2007 way of writing script kiddie. Script kiddies used to be seen as nuisances (ca. 1997), teenagers with modems who took to downloading and running attack scripts written by real crackers, causing havoc on the information superhighway. I suspect that some graduated to the more focused criminal activities that you hear about a lot these days: phishing, spambot nets, keylogging...

Of course Flickr has bugs, like almost any software. That's not why I put that quote up there. The reason I found this news item so amusing and troubling is just that in the first paragraph they say essentially "make sure the URL is flickr.com", then in the next paragraph they say "go to login.yahoo.com". WTF? Is Joe Internet User supposed to know that that's OK because Yahoo owns Flickr and there's this single sign-on thing that Yahoo is implementing via a centralized login server that sits on a yahoo.com subdomain? You'll land on a page that "looks like Flickr" but that certainly is not on flickr.com. How much do people need to know to understand what the Flickr people meant with this?

There is plenty of evidence that all this noise is turning us deaf. Let's take an easy case in point: how is paypal going to successfully communicate to me about some security problem with my account that has been dormant for years? I never open a paypal email. I don't read security sites. Even if I did, it would all be a blur at this point. Take what happened here in Massachusetts. There's been a lot of talk about the breach at TJX, the holding company that owns TJMaxx. Hundreds of thousands of credit and debit card numbers stolen in December. Ours could very well have been in the lot. There have been daily stories on WBUR since the breach was made public a week ago. My point is, we know about it, right? Yet we haven't canceled any of our cards. Is this bizarre or just normal? I probably made a subconscious cost-benefit analysis and decided that it wasn't worth the trouble. So, you know who has won already.

I have also recently been paranoid about what other recent users of a department laptop might have installed (unwittingly, I am sure, through an Outlook update or something). Microsoft Windows XP is a complex beast, many many moving parts, all interconnected. Many things that can go wrong and do. Here is a screenshot that shows how wrong Microsoft can get the simplest things. One could be tempted to say, "Oh but that's nothing, just one of those stupid messages...", but the sense I get is that if they can get something that simple so wrong, there's really no end to what they can screw up. After all, there's a lot riding on stupid messages these days.

Posted by: Erik at January 30, 2007 10:23 AM

The yahoo flickr log in is assinine. It's particularly a hassle to schizophrenics like myself who have multiple accounts on pretty much every social software app around (two on tribe, two on yahoo that I keep up with, two on flickr, three or four on fotolog etc). Now my main yahoo account is associated with my alt flickr account and vice versa and there is no way for me to change it because for some weird reason they are designed for people to have only one identity.

I wonder what happened to flickr.

Posted by: Tracy at January 30, 2007 01:12 PM

Thank you, Erik, now I understand. I can't remember who I am on Flickr/Yahoo and Yahoo/Flickr doesn't recognize my Yahoo ID radananita (that I can remember)even though it gives me my special, secure, personally-designed-from-Yahoo-components sign-in page.

Posted by: Nini at January 31, 2007 04:44 AM

I received an email from Flickr today:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

Everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID.

- The Flickreenos

*I try to do the thing*

Your kaicarver Yahoo! account is already merged with your Kai Carver Flickr account.
So, you can't merge your kaicarver Flickr account with your Yahoo! account. You'll need to use a different Yahoo! account (or start a new one).

*bork*

Dear Flickr,

1. Please don't shut me down.
2. Please don't use terms like "Old Skool" and "Flicreeno".
3. Actually, I don't really like you that much anymore.

k (aka k)

(not really sent, of course: who would I send it to?)

I ended up getting out of the weird limbo by deleting my phantom Flickr account, which I acquired I dunno how.

Tracy, there may be hope for your multiple-personality case by March 15.

PS: Oh and Flickr? Please stop saying hello in different languages to me.

Posted by: Kai Carver at January 31, 2007 05:48 AM

>(not really sent, of course: who would I send it to?)

Katerina. I think she wrote most of the copy on Flickr. Don't tell her you know me.

The copy doesn't bother me, but the yahoo bs really irks.