perldiver

I'm trying to sign up for Flickr, which is a Yahoo property.  Do I have a Yahoo email?  I dunno, maybe at one point, who cares?  Oh, "dstorrs" is taken?  Fine, let me see if that was more then.

Off to http://yahoo.com/.  Hm...where do I log in?

Ok, forget that.  I bet it's http://mail.yahoo.com/.  Yep.

Ok, try some of my standard "low-priority site" passwords.  Nope, none get me in.

Click "Help! I've forgotten my password and I can't get up!"

After some middling steps, they ask me for my alternate address.  In small font, generated by Javascript so that you can't cut/paste it and (in theory) a harvester won't see it, they say "Hint:  Your alternate email is ***********@e********.net"

I kid you not.  So, basically, I know that the account name that I was probing for is "dstorrs", and I know that the domain is earthlink.net.


I'm reminded of a card named "Filter" from the old Netrunner CCG  The flavor text was along the lines of "Yes, it will let you in if you got the password mostly right--but hey, at least it's free!" (*)


(*) Yes, I'm a geek and yes, the Internet knows everything.  Actually the text was "Friendly even to numerically challenged employees, it accepts transposed numerals in the access codes."  I think my version was funnier.  And the card was a zero cost [i.e., free] Code Gate.