SRHuston Dot Net

Dirty old mountain all covered in smoke, she can turn you to stone so you better start doing it right.

–Genesis, “Dance on a Volcano”

Made it to a scout meeting tonight, first one this year I could attend and first one in a while (most of last year I was still having so much trouble with arthritis that even though it was after work, I had no energy to get a shower and leave in time). Hopped on the wireless there with my Chromebook and fired up Tailscale, and while I did have a hiccup or two at first, the rest of the evening my web traffic was coming from my own home network. It wasn’t necessary for security tonight – I didn’t care if my traffic was coming from the church’s wireless, and that wireless is encrypted as well – but it was a good experiment since that was the first time being somewhere outside of home where I could test it out. And I attribute some of the slowness I saw to the normal speed of the network there. So I’d say it was a success, and opens the doors for other things I’ll be able to do remotely now.

I’ve had a lot of IM accounts over the years.  Powwow was I think my first, and then ICQ was a quick follow-up after that (which I had until some ‘tard decided it would be funny to brute-force the account and lock me out of it, and thanks to ICQ’s craptacular policies I have no way to get it back – so if you see 2109563 online, tell him he’s a fuckhead).  Anyway, the problem is disparity: With all these different networks, I have too many places to check for things.  For a while I used Bitlbee to keep all the networks together in one place which worked nicely – all of my chat logs where on my home computer which I could access from anywhere, no more searching through a few different machines to find that link that someone sent me, whatever.  The problem is with mobile access: I wanted to be able to IM Stephanie from my phone instead of using SMS messages all the time.  Combine that with the number of “friends” I would watch go online and offline and never say a word to me and I decided IM wasn’t worth it anyway.  When Meebo released their iPhone app, I decided to give it another go since Stephanie and I could use it instead of Google Voice for messaging each other.  It works very well – and I like being able to reply on the web site instead of being forced to use the phone when I’ve got a full keyboard in front of me – but I still have these networks like MSN, AIM and Yahoo where I rarely get messages, don’t want to ignore them, but don’t like that I can’t use whatever client from wherever whenever I want.  So I think I found a solution to the networks that don’t allow for multiple logins without extra complexity.  Using trigger.pl, an irssi script, I have a rule setup to automatically reply to someone who IMs me on AIM, Yahoo or MSN and tells them to use my Google Chat account instead.  If you don’t know the address, just send me an email and I’ll tell you!  This way, I can use whatever IM client I’m closest to and is most convenient, but they’re all connected in a way that I can seamlessly move from one to another – and still keep chat history in a single location.  It’s not as nice as having it all on my computer, since things like ‘grep -R’ aren’t available, but Google’s search works well enough that it’s not an issue.

Next step is to setup OTR messaging, but I have to dig around and see what has changed in the months since I last used OTR plugins in irssi.

I forgot to post this back when I noticed it, but a little while ago I found something interesting.  I loaded my Google profile, and lo and behold!  What’s that in the upper right corner?  It’s a list of domains where my email address has been verified.  Fancy that, the option to turn them on finally showed up, and I did so.  And it was good.  Don’t know if my previous post on the matter had anything to do with it, but if some random Googler found my plea and fixed it.. thanks :>

I’ve had a Google profile for some time now, and like that it makes a simple place where I can keep all of my “digital selves” gathered together.  If you search for my name, instead of showing up on page four after a painter and a programmer from Massachusetts I’m on the first page; follow the link to the profile, and there’s a photo of me, a little bit about me, and links to all the places online that have other information about me.  It’s a nice way to tie your digital identities together, since otherwise there’s just a mash of Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr pages which don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another.  However, there’s one thing which still eludes me in my profile: verified domains.  Some people (such as Leigh, or Leo Laporte) have that little bit in the upper right that says “Verified email at <domain>”.  If you look at Google’s help pages, they say once you’ve added email addresses to your account and verified them (which is a simple process, you edit your account and type the new address, get an email, click a link, enter your Google password, you’re done) then those domains for which you have verified email addresses will show up as check boxes near the top of the page when you edit your profile, and you can choose which ones to include.  I have no such check boxes – and I have tried removing email addresses, verifying them again, hell I’ve even tried setting up Google Apps and verifying the domain itself with Google Webmaster Tools.  Nothing seems to get them to appear.

While that’s annoying, there’s something even worse in my opinion.  There is no place where I can ask for help with this.  There is no “Contact” link where I can fill out a form and be promised that I’ll get an email back in the next month or so.  There is no place where I can even post on a forum for this, because none of the Google Help forums have anything to do with one’s account or profile.  There’s no email address I can send a message to and say, “Hey this isn’t working, can someone have a look please?”  Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  All the contact pages either point to some “try these things” items, or something asking you to go to the help forums (which as I mentioned, appear to not exist for profiles or accounts).  So, here’s where I decide to use the web’s collective intelligence and bargaining power, or something.

If you are, or if you know, someone at Google, or someone who can help with this, please have them contact me.  They can use the “Send a message” link on my profile (linked above), or not too much searching would probably reveal one of my many email addresses.  Or, if you know someplace where I can ask, or someone I can contact to ask for help, that works too.  I’m not expecting instant results here – Google is a big company, I’m one person.  But some place where I can get in a queue, even if it means I wait a couple months for someone to say “Oh, I see what was wrong, it’s fixed now” would be better than the current situation, which is basically any friends I ask about this saying, “Well it works for me.”

To go along with my password article, here’s one showing the bad side of passwords.  This is a copy of the “password rules” for Intel’s website, which I use for getting access to their licensed compilers.  Before 1Password, the rules here were so draconian that I took to writing the password down on a piece of paper (yes, a sysadmin doing exactly what he tells people not to do!)  There was no way I could follow their rules and remember a password when I only use it maybe twice a year; especially since they require it be changed every couple months, so every time I’d use it I’d have to change it!  This proves that a password policy can be too “secure” – so much so that it drives security all the way back to the point where you might as well not ask for a password at all, since they no longer hold any meaning (or real security).

Password Rules:

• The password must be at least eight characters long, and can contain letters, numbers, and punctuation.
• It must not exceed fourteen (14) characters.
• It must contain at least one alpha character [a-z; A-Z], one numeric [0-9] and one special character [`! @$%^&*()-_=+[];:'”,<.>/?].
• It cannot contain spaces.
• The password cannot be the same as any of your previous eight (8) passwords.
• It cannot contain your login id.
• It may not contain any of the following special characters: Asterisk (*) Comma (,) Backslash ( /) Forward Slash (\).

It must not:

• Be a name (your own, family members, pets, or famous people)
• Be your social security number, driver’s license number, passport number or some other identification number.
• Be repeating numbers, letters or characters (111111, aaaaaa, !!!!!!)
• Be a number or character combinations that are next to each other on the keyboard (123456, asdfgh)
• Be a dictionary word of any language
• Begin with an exclamation point (!) or question mark (?)
• Contain your IDSID or WWID
• Have the same first three characters.

As I sit here watching my network connection go up and down, like it did a few days ago, I’m reminded of a problem I have with Verizon any time I have problems with my DSL (which I’ll happily admit is very infrequently, so kudos for that).  And that is, there is nowhere.. NOWHERE.. that I can go on their website to file a problem report.  No, call their 888 number, it’s “faster”!  Yeah, except when I don’t have time to call and wait on hold for a half hour for the next available representative.  I know they’ve got a trouble ticketing system in there somewhere, because once you’ve called and reported a problem you can track its status online.  But a company that deals heavily in Internet products having no way on the Internet to report problems?  Don’t suck.

I’ve had this conversation with people there every time I’ve had a problem with their service (since the first time I ever did when I asked, “Where do I go to file a ticket online, I couldn’t find it?”) and every time I’ve been told they’ll forward my request “up the chain” to someone else.  So I can only guess that there’s someone there who thinks end-users are either too stupid or otherwise undeserving of the ability to type in what their problem is and click submit.  At least calling the business DSL office, when you can get in touch with someone, usually doesn’t result in a comment about rebooting Windows…