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Two experiences: 1. A web site that demands your mother's maiden name for a security verification question. Of course, that's ridiculously insecure, so I enter
by CWuestefeld 16y ago
Two experiences:
1. A web site that demands your mother's maiden name for a security verification question. Of course, that's ridiculously insecure, so I entered my wife's mother's maiden name instead. It turns out that it won't accept names less than 4 letters -- which excludes a very large portion of those of Chinese descent.
2. New Jersey has all kinds of regulations governing your identity authentication when you go to renew your driver's license. If your current license mis-matches your documents, you really have to jump through hoops. My problems is that my first name is "Christopher" -- a common enough name -- which is too long to fit in their system's 10-character field. So they only put on my license "C S Wuestefeld", meaning that my name mismatches, ensuring that I'll always have a mismatch, and be subject to their extra verifications.
- d_r 16y agoWhenever possible, I just enter a randomly generated password for those ridiculous "security question" fields. Isn't "your first job" or "your hometown" easily discoverable via my Facebook profile?
- frou_dh 16y agoIn addition that assumes you trust your entire family & anyone else who happens to know a bit about you.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoSome sites have taken to occasionally asking you these verification questions, even under "normal" circumstances when you haven't lost your password. So it's necessary to remember the answers. And it seems that tools like RoboForm aren't yet very good for tracking this.
- lotharbot 16y agoRight - the security questions are just a secondary verification method. I simply fill them in with a secondary password. This does occasionally lead to hilarity when I have to do business over the phone, and they want to use those questions to verify my identity. "What town did you honeymoon in?" "P7qkn1~f"
- pjscott 16y agoSituations like that are exactly why I try to avoid using the "~" character in strings that anybody else might have to type in. A lot of people have no idea what "tilde" means, or where the ~ key is located. The same problem crops up with ampersands, carets, and "#", for which nobody can seem to agree on a name.