Passwords and petrified erasers

Alright, I’m going to rant a bit. There have been a lot of things going on, but small things can stick out of the churning maelstrom of activity.

I’ve written before about two-factor fuckery, the often needless application of high security for online accounts that really aren’t that important. A recent post on Xitter captures just how frustrated academics are with this crap:

(I disagree with the PowerPoint allotment, but the rest seems about right.)

Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ to describe the sort of platform decay we see with products like Google (e.g., here, and here). But I think it should be expanded to include the ongoing degradation of the entire online experience.

When I am working, actually interacting with UAF’s purchased software, some algorithm monkey somewhere just pulls the plug, stops everything, and makes me prove once again that I’m me. It’s infuriating. So I just leave my accounts open, always, on every machine I use during the day (as many as four). So secure.

On my new laptop, which of course debuts a ridiculous new look and feel of an operating system that takes weeks to figure out how to fix so it works the way I want, I made the stupidest user mistake. I let “my institution” have a crack at it while I set it up. Oh, god. Now at random times it makes me create a new PIN just to fire it up. And I can’t extend the idle time beyond 15 minutes without satisfying some other ridiculous algorithm monkey. I want to take a sledgehammer to it. How am I supposed to remember mildly different PINs across days and weeks when hopping among different computers to do different things?

And that’s where the passwords come in. I have a book of them, of course, and it’s one of the few things I use pencil for. I write cryptic reminders of what a password for a thing is—sometimes so cryptic even I can’t figure it out. Then, when I have to change one, I have to find an eraser that isn’t petrified. I swear, I have access to dozens of pencils, but not one of the damned things is young enough to have any life left in its eraser. So I have to go looking for one of the two erasers that I own. I treasure these erasers. They are an excellent reminder of how ridiculous the online experience has become. Not only do I have to prove that I’m me, I have to find an object in the physical world to do it effectively.

And that reminds me that I’m still a curmudgeon when it comes to smart phones. What a great tool— when I am traveling. So I rarely carry one. But I teach in a “smart” classroom, and to get onto the computer there I, yes, have to prove that I am me, twice: once with my supersecret password and once again with this real-world object that I am supposed to be carrying. You guessed it—I often forget to carry my phone when I am headed off to class. Sledgehammers again come to mind. The computational tail is wagging the dog. I just want a tool that tells all the machines I have to work with, “Kiss the ring, fucker!”

Alright. I needed to get that off my chest. There are calming things going on, too. Yesterday as I sat in my office at home working on a really interesting paper, a gorgeous cross fox loped across the wooded slope behind the house. (A cross fox is a melanistic color morph of a red fox, and they are surprisingly common in this neighborhood.) And yesterday evening, Rose spotted a beautiful cow moose at the edge of the backyard. This moose is heavily pregnant. As we watched her, her calf from last year came out of the woods to join her. We haven’t seen these two before. They proceeded to paw up and eat choice pieces of the compost we’d dumped on the compost pile throughout the winter. I think it’s only the second time I can remember moose doing that. I’ll bet onion and garlic skins, broccoli and asparagus stems, and old flowers taste pretty good after a winter of sticks.

Finally, after dark, I made sure to refill the bird feeder. The pigpolls have been pretty nearly emptying it every day. As I stepped out, a night squirrel leaped off the feeder (northern flying squirrel). Life is good after all.

P.S. The good feelings did not last long. After posting this, I noticed that it didn’t send me an email, as it usually does. Oh, what befuckery hath software upgrades wrought? I have no control over these systems’ needs to be constantly upgraded, and they not infrequently break something that used to work perfectly. I didn’t have time to try the different fixes The Google recommended, so I set it aside for a week. Then I wasted too much time on a Sunday going through an extremely arcane process to carve another email solution. It worked, but cripes — upgrades just as often create substantial downgrades. (On our analysis computers at school we have one rule: NEVER LET IT UPGRADE ANYTHING. It works pretty well. Though I did that with one of my own laptops once and after a few years it experienced catastrophic failure.)