22 December 2007

Password Resets for Dead People

Does anyone else see what's wrong with those new website password reset schemes where they ask you a half a dozen questions like, "What's your favorite food?", "What's your favorite car?", etc..?

Umm... what if I change my mind about what's my favorite? The only time I expect to stop changing my mind about things is when I am dead.

Seriously, what this amounts to is now having six extra passwords that I have to memorize, any three of which can be thrown at me at any time and they are all based on criteria that is changing.

The worst part is, the site that I just used where this happened ( an partners extranet portal of a major software company ), automatically expires my password every three months!

Ouch.

This makes the site basically unusable to me.

Too bad. I am sure they put a lot of work into the rest of their site.