Yahoo says my password is too weak

A lot of visitors searching for data on a Yahoo ‘password too weak’ issue end up on my own Password is too weak… page.

My own issue was with BT – but since there is a close relationship between BT and Yahoo, it may well be exactly the same problem. The answer lies within the comments on my earlier page. Put simply, the BT password rules exclude certain characters that get generated by password managers (such as vertical bars), and is limited to 16 characters.

If you go over 16 characters and include vertical bars then you get a ‘password too weak’ error when actually your password is being rejected because it is too strong.

I don’t use Yahoo so cannot confirm whether this is the same issue. However, if Yahoo is continually rejecting your password as ‘too weak’ it would be worth checking the small print; and perhaps limiting your password to 16 characters – and no vertical bars.

Silly, childish lies from companies that should know better

I subscribe to a number of paper.li dailies. I use them to aggregate news stories for me that I probably wouldn’t find on the BBC – Anonymous, civil liberties, censorship etcetera.

So I was a little perturbed when I couldn’t access them yesterday. I got the emails with the links alright, but the links didn’t work. Rather than my selected Daily, I got this:

Silly lies from BT/Yahoo

My first thought, naturally, was that some sinister, subtle censorship was underway – perhaps one of the dailies included a proxy for The Pirate Bay and BT felt it necessary to ‘block’ it. Far-fetched, maybe – but the society we now have makes such thoughts inevitable. It turned out not to be censorship, but (or so I understand) ‘DNS issues’ at paper.li.

But I’m still concerned. Look at the page that BT/Yahoo sent me to. Did I mean ‘gap.co.uk’? Now by what stretch of the imagination does mis-typing ‘paper.li’ end up with ‘gap.co.uk’?

Gap Inc, says Gap, “is a leading global specialty retailer offering clothing, accessories, and personal care products for men, women, children, and babies under the Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime, and Athleta brands.” Yeah, well, I guess that can easily be confused with an off-the-wall news aggregator.

Then there’s the ‘related searches’. Now, how can there be a related search when I haven’t made a search?

The simple fact is that these are all paid-for adverts. I don’t actually mind that. But what I seriously object to is BT/Yahoo trying to pretend that they’re providing me with a service when they’re simply accepting money from advertisers. It’s this low-level petty deceit that I find both disturbing and frankly pathetic.

Aethelred versus the Vikings – a neverending story

My peers may remember playing Saxons and Normans on the beach as small children (it was before black and white television and the rise of cowboys and indians and cops and robbers). The alternative was Saxons and Vikings; but suffered because apart from Harold we only knew two Saxons: Alfred and Aethelred. Aethelred was the short straw, because he was never ready – or more accurately, he was ill-advised and accepted bad or no counsel.

Vikings embarking on a denial of service attack – source Wikipedia

Well Aethelred and the Vikings are making a comeback. Aethelred is business and the Vikings are hackers; and it doesn’t seem to matter what good advice is given, Aethelred ignores it and the hackers come back – again, and to gain and again.

Good counsel: encrypt, but Aethelred does not. Use and enforce strong passwords, but he doesn’t. Undertake staff awareness training on a continuous basis, but he doesn’t bother. The list goes on and on.

But the absolute perfect proof that the spirit of Aethelred yet lives and breathes can be seen in a comment from Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network Security. He was talking about the DDoS attack on Battlefield 3, “yet another in a long line of attacks aimed at disrupting gamers.”

Sometimes such attacks come from the competition; other times its just for the lulz. But, he adds, “Another motive our clients in gaming and across other sectors continue to experience is cyber extortion. Malicious users specifically threaten gaming and other sites, demanding to be paid a ransom or be the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. More often than not these blackmail threats go unreported as some companies opt to pay the ransom rather than go public with the attack in the hope that this will satisfy the hackers, though this is rarely the case and may lead to the site continually being targeted.”

Aethelred, a long-standing Anglo-Saxon tradition that believes we can yet get peace in our time, lives on. Looks like the Vikings are winning again.