Archive for July, 2008
Yes, a username is supposed to be unique and identifying…
… but, alas, «Miele Turvask» (Miele.com) have decided on something different:
Today I had decided to do my laundry (it was starting to pile up quite badly), and as it is, it would be my first go at the new laundry system for my apartment. It is supposed to be quite smart; you can reserve your time online, you can have the system warn you by a SMS to your phone when your laundry is close to finishing, and all sorts of fancy-smancy features. So; I found my nice “ID-card” for it, expecting it all to go smoothly (stupid me).
And as I had somehow misplaced the username/password for the online management-system, I had to go fetch it from the laundry. I happily walked down and requested the u/p and got my first turndown:
Username: AAYAABIAFEBYMMZYEAB
Password: ec70cd
What The Fuck?
AAYAABIAFEBYMMZYEAB.
One more time:
AAYAABIAFEBYMMZYEAB (!!)
That’s one hard-to-remember username! And what’s with the password? Only 6 characters long… “Ok…”, I thought, “it could’ve been worse”. But I almost suspected some kind of mixup of username/password — it would’ve made more sense the other way around, somehow.
So, I headed back up to my apartment to login to the system and have a go at the system to “set up” my account (not much, but I also had to deposit some small money to the account).
I got back and fired up Firefox and headed over to http://www.turvask.miele.dk/login/public/ . And as I suspected from the URL; it surely is a Ruby on Rails application (no grudges on RoR, though — the app worked well all the way through my session).
At the login-page though, the second obstruction became obvious; as I had carefully typed in the u/p and submitted the form, RoR instantly told me that the combination of u&p was incorrect. Damn! Must be something I mistyped, but alas, on the second attempt — typing with even more care (I guess I looked like my grandmother typing on the keyboard; one key at a time, with only one index finger) — I still was rejected. Then I tried to swap the two, hoping for some kind of mixup — but there was not much more help there either…
After giving up trying various combinations of the userinfo above I rumaged around the site for a second (not many helpfull links there), before heading over to the homepage of my student village to try to seek out some explanation to this issue.
I found none at first glance, looking through a couple of sections for any helpfull tips, etc. And then I spotted some nice links — one for each of the laundries at this student village — “hidden away” nondescriptively at the bottom of one of the pages. I clicked the link for “my” laundry, and was prompted with a “HTTP-AUTH“-window. Could it be that this would be the apropriate time and place for my insane username and all-to-simple password? Again typing like my grandmother, I very carefully wrote the username/password and hit OK.
Finally! It worked! And I could change my username and password there ( Yippie-ka-phew! I won’t have to go around using such a stupid coice of username, so there’s no chance for you to login there authenticated as me. So sorry for that, but I can assure you; there’s nothing much of interest there. No interesting personal information.)!
But, seriously; why the F!CK have such a username(!?!), and also that kind of short-not all too difficult password? If you have that kind of username, you could have 26^19 unique usernames. That’s
7.66467265 × 1026 = 766.467.265.000.000.000.000.000.000
That’s
7.66467265 × 1026 / 6.707.994.219 = 1,14261766 × 1017 = 114.261.766.000.000.000
accounts for each and every human living on the earth as of 07/05/08 at 13:59 GMT!
That’s what I call ambition, Miele!
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