Life Preservers

Heartbleed Brainbleed

April 14, 2014 at 3:55 pm Leave a comment

Call me old. Call me a curmudgeon. Call me old-fashioned. But I don’t believe technology can replace human assistance. I also don’t believe we will ever be a paperless society. Here’s one reason why.

1. Heard about heartbleed virus.

If you haven’t, check out this link. You can type in a website address to see if it’s at risk. If there’s a risk, change your password for that site — and for any site where you have used the same password. And, yes, Last Pass is trying to sell you their service, but the website checker is free and easy to use. 

2. Used the site mentioned above to start checking the websites that I use.

3. Discovered that lifelock.com was a “possibly” infected site. Yikes!

4. Went to lifelock.com to change my password.

5. Could not remember the password (because I made it a really complex one, of course).

6. Used the site’s “forgot your password” feature. Got a pop-up saying an email had been sent and that I should contact customer service if I did not receive the email.

7. Checked email, including spam folder, etc.

8. Waited. Checked email again.

9. Waited. Checked email again.

10. Called customer service. Explained. She gave me a temporary password.

11. Tried to log in with the temporary password. It didn’t work.

12. Called customer service again. Different rep gave me a temporary username — which was the exact same series of letters and numbers as the temporary password the other rep had given me (so, yeah, perhaps technology could replace a few people, but . . .) — and a new, different temporary password. The second rep also emailed the information to me.

13. I got logged in and changed my password to something that included lower case letters, capital letters, and numbers. It didn’t work — because I didn’t include a symbol. (The symbol I want to use does not exist on a keyboard.)

Whew. That was for ONE website. I’ve spent most of the morning navigating websites in search of the “change password” button. My brain is spinning like a Mac rainbow dot trying to recall every site I’ve ever used. And I’ve grown a tumor or two on the right side of my cerebral cortex trying to come up with complex passwords. If I now need a unique password for every site I use, you know and I know, I won’t be able to remember half of them by this evening.

So, I need to write them all down on a piece of paper.

Entry filed under: Humor - Commentary. Tags: heartbleed, humans vs. technology, passwords, technology.