{"id":300,"date":"2006-09-17T20:01:24","date_gmt":"2006-09-17T09:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/17\/security-questions\/"},"modified":"2006-09-17T20:01:24","modified_gmt":"2006-09-17T09:01:24","slug":"security-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/17\/security-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Security Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

“We’ve had some problems with the system, and we’ve had to reset all the passwords.” said the call-center agent, “Before I can tell you your new password, I need you to garlphrumph kwellaos.”<\/p>\n

It was a standard problem: The voice-quality on the long-distance call was poor. Her accent wasn’t helping. On top of that, the ability to distinguish signal from noise when it comes to speech has never been a strong point of mine. I’ve always been crap at making out the lyrics from songs.<\/p>\n

I asked her, for the third time in that call, to repeat herself.<\/p>\n

“Before I can reset your password, I need you to answer some security questions.”<\/p>\n

That wasn’t much better. In my attempt to set security questions that only I would know the answer to, I’ve set myself some doozies in the past. <\/p>\n

\nEarlier the same week, I tried to access my mobile phone account from an Internet terminal. The password was securely stored at home in my Password Safe<\/a> database, but I didn’t have access to it from where I was.<\/p>\n

So what was the secret question I had left myself on the mobile phone web site? “What password is stored for this in your Password Safe database?” <\/p>\n

Nice one, Einstein!\n<\/p><\/div>\n

“Okay, what are the questions?”<\/p>\n

“What was your mother’s maiden name?”<\/p>\n

Okay, that was easy. I told her the answer (as could dozens of other people who know me).<\/p>\n

“What’s the name of the guy on first?”<\/p>\n

What sort of security question is that? Could the answer really be “No! What’s the name of the guy on second! Who’s on first!”? But that’s hardly a secret. Did I really set that? Maybe I meant something else. How else could that be read?<\/p>\n

I laughed: “Was that really my security question?”<\/p>\n

She patiently repeated the question, a little more clearly this time: “What was your place of birth?”<\/p>\n

Oh! I understand now!<\/p>\n

Penny Arcade<\/a> on Security Questions<\/h4>\n

\"Penny<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before I can tell you your new password, I need you to garlphrumph kwellaos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,35,30,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-heroic-failures","category-humour","category-story-telling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}