• my name is missing (unregistered)

    When I visit Taipei I always extend my stay beyond the end of the month.

  • Hans (unregistered)

    I have never understood the purpose of "security questions" where a basic social media search will provide the answers

  • (nodebb)

    "What was the name of your first pet?" "1ngrid Bergman" "Please provide an Answer(s) in a valid format to the Security Question(s)"

  • Sally Flynn (unregistered)

    Taiwan/Taipei has more Sundays than the rest of the world? Sign me up! :D

  • (nodebb)

    The 25 hour developer got involved with Taiwanese calendars and that country will now prosper!! Or not.

  • (nodebb)

    I'm intrigued by the kind of problems caused by Scandinavian letters in the answers, but that aren't caused by e.g. éèçàâêîôûùäëïöü...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Hans

    Their purpose is to provide a less secure, easy to deduce password into your vital information so that is anyone needs emergency access into your life savings to buy themselves a trip out of the country, or just to buy that new 70 inch HD TV, they can. Not a bug, won't fix, works as expected.

  • kktkkr (unregistered)

    It's the Halloween trilogy!

  • Korbachev Lekov (unregistered)

    "4 decades 9 years ago" instead of the far more easily understood "49 years ago"? That's TRWTF.

  • P (unregistered)

    I'd like to be there when Robert N. calls for his Golden Retriever :)

  • Nadz (unregistered) in reply to Korbachev Lekov

    Presumably epoch-based?

  • brian (unregistered) in reply to Korbachev Lekov

    2 score and 9 years ago, robert reich wroteth...

  • A. Glez. B. (unregistered) in reply to P

    He calls it "dog".

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Hans

    It's a great example of engineering inertia. The concept of security questions existed long before social media became a thing, as in the old "Prove your identity by telling me something only you (and I) would know." Then social media came along and sent the whole notion of privacy flying right out the window, but people found it easier to stick with broken but familiar methods than come up with something new.

    You might as well ask "Why do we still use passwords despite their many obvious flaws?"

  • (nodebb) in reply to brian

    That type of construction is sooo 19th century.

  • Scott (unregistered)

    Who's a good dog? YdHiQuk%Aw&% is!

  • (nodebb) in reply to P

    I'd like to be there when Robert N. calls for his Golden Retriever :)

    Dear Sir or Madam:

    You win the Internet!

    Regards, B

  • markm (unregistered)

    "4 decades 9 years ago" is 1970, so it defaulted to 0 in the Windows date-time system. That's a strange way to display the date, but apparently web designers have come to assume that users don't understand dates...

  • Kleyguerth (github) in reply to markm

    It is possibly meant to display stuff from minutes or hours ago, but they used a general library that can display at least up to "decades". That display isn't a WTF when you want to show "15 minutes ago" or "6 hours ago".

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    I hate hate HATE sites that format all timestamps in relative time with no option to use absolute times. They're incredibly imprecise for no good reason.

    If something was posted "1 day ago", that's a 100% error margin: it could have been posted anywhere from 24 to 47.9 hours ago, and the time of day it was posted was very likely to be relevant. Likewise if something was posted "1 year ago", it could have been posted anywhere from 365 to 729 days ago or so (modulo details about how it handles leap years). That "post" from 4 decades 9 years ago could have any time from early 1969 to early 1970, though we can easily infer it was January 1, 1970 because it's obviously the Unix epoch.

  • get off my lawn (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    Old joke: this dinosaur is 5 million and three years old. Wow, that's really precise, how to they know this? I started working here three years ago and they told me it was 5 million years old then.

  • silent_d (unregistered)

    On the NANth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

  • (nodebb)

    Oh, good, something to look forward to. License renewal systems that can't keep track of what's been renewed. Imagine:

    There are NAN days left on your license. Auto-renewing $79.95 billed to your credit card on February 22nd. There are NAN days left on your license. Auto-renewing $79.95 billed to your credit card on February 23rd. There are NAN days left on your license. Auto-renewing $79.95 billed to your credit card on February 24th. There are NAN days left on your license. Auto-renewing $79.95 billed to your credit card on February 25th. Etc.

  • Alex Papadumbass (unregistered) in reply to Hans

    You provide the "correct" answer to those questions? Seriously?

  • WTFGuy (unregistered) in reply to Hans

    Perhaps one ought not post all that info on social media. Or equally, one ought to use made up answers according to a rule that only you know.

    Neither is secure in a 21st century "Defeat the NSA and/or Bulgarian data thieves" sense, but for many purposes it's still good enough.

  • Peter Tramo (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    +1. There is absolutely no reason to do this. I'll sometimes wonder when exactly something was published and as you said, it is sometimes relevant to know if it was before or after a known event. Something I hate even more though is those many forums where the date of messages is displayed without the year. Just "Nov. 25". The exact date is obviously recorded, so is the year then, but you won't get it. If you want to know the year of an old message, you have to spend hours browsing backwards from today through all more recent threads and more recent messages in the thread and counting the years. Also, cross your fingers you won't run into a several-year bump. This is just crippling the UX for no reason.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Peter Tramo

    For the same reason I hate blogs, blogs skins (such as Tumblr skins) etc. that don't show the date at all.

  • sizer99 (google)

    It's very annoying to have security question answers like ' YdHiQuk%Aw&%' if you end up having to call support, or it's your bank, etc. or anywhere a human might ask you to verify it. Make it random but pronounceable - several password programs like LastPass can do that, so now your dog is named 'FooDeLHardErZaRGix' . Make sure you don't laugh while reading it back to the nice lady.

  • (nodebb)

    Hopefully it will accept Correct Horse Battery Staple as the name of a horse.

  • (nodebb)

    Ugh, I need to cross YdHiQuk%Aw&% off my list of secure passwords...

  • 🤷 (unregistered)

    Late to the show, but what exactly ARE "scandinavian characters"? In Norway and Denmark, they use å,ø and æ. And at least in Norway they also use é from time to time (don't know about Denmark), for example to say "én bil", which is one car (instead of just "a car"). In Sweden, they don't use æ or ø, and instead use ä and ö. But so does Germany, Switzerland and Austria (and Belgium and Luxembourg, at least in the parts where German is the native language), but those definetly aren't scandinavian countries. So are ä and ö part of the "scandinavian characters" or not?

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