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| Author | A random rant about recent experiences with corporate IT solutions ... (Read 142356 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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cballero
1024 MB  Posts: 1179 System 7, today and forever 
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Reply #15 on: September 20, 2022, 11:54
I'm so sorry about your mom's passing, Wove!!!  Data privacy and security has been such a cat and mouse game, but that's a primary driver to steering clear of older technologies, effectively shackling everyone to modern systems, that even with all of their safeguards, both can and are continuously being thwarted by all manner of malfeasance. Someone close to me was swindled over $4k USD this month alone, it was her first paid summer gig and she's in shambles now; she had hoped to save it for something special, like maybe her first car or to use for a week's vacation with some of her college friends to France, but just like that, poof, all of it was gone electronically. So much for trusting modern systems. Her financial institution is investigating the incident, but I fear her money's all but gone into a crook's pocket at this point
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #16 on: September 21, 2022, 23:06
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Classic example of modern IT madness fresh from the boiler plate: I've been a faithful customer of Hostway for over a decade now - but this one will cause me to switch my hosting provider asap. I tried to check on the Facebook page of a close friend that I am maintaining and the FB-login now requires 2FA. So I type in the e-mail address that I had set up on my own domain for that purpose with Hostway. Mind you, I am the admin of my domain and thus can change whatever I want whenever I like. Most assuredly I can reset the passwords for any of my e-mail accounts from the admin workbench. So imagine my bewilderment when I wasn't allowed to log into the web interface of my Hostway mail account, because the systems all of a sudden insisted on me filling out a questionnaire for "password recovery" first. It contained the abysmally inflationary questions about such well hidden secrets as the name of my primary school, the town I currently live in or my dog's name. All info that - if filled out honestly - any halfway decent hacker could easily guess from my Facebook page. Who the f@ck comes up with sheyit like this in the first place?!! But the absolute hammer was that Hostway's customer (non)support insisted that this artificial obstacle was supposed to be good for me, because "many people don't know what to do if they forgot the password to their e-mail account". Well, I for one am not "many people" and if you run a website but are too dumb to reset your mail password from your admin account, then maybe you should hire a guy like me to do it for you.  Long story short, they will not disable that new questionnaire "feature" for me, so I'll put in three answers they can write down for the corporate history book. Next stop: Get a new service provider who doesn't insist on doing me favors I didn't ask for.
Last Edit: September 21, 2022, 23:10 by 68040
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #17 on: September 09, 2025, 13:22
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I have to resurrect this thread and share a story from this weekend with all of you :-) My dear wife and I recently changed our bank. With it came the chore of having to inform everybody and their uncle about our new bank account. You see, in Europe, and particularly in Germany, things work a little different. For regular reoccurring payments, you usually grant companies permission to monthly deduct the sum from your bank account. The e.g. phone company then requests at the bank that the money be taken from your account and moved to theirs monthly. That is very common here for paying utility bills. All you have to do is to make sure the account has the necessary funds :-) Anyway, since my account changed, I wanted to inform the administration responsible for handling the payback of student loans. "BAFöG", for those familiar  So I had registered a user at their website years ago but never bothered using it. Today I've found out that my user account holds zero information with everything greyed out, because, I'd only get it if I'd sign up via an additional personal identification app using my personal identification card. e-mail + password as a combo obviously doesn't suffice.Angrily, I downloaded the app. Which required my personal identification card to have its online function activated. Which required another app. Alright, alright. All done, only took me an hour. I get back to the student loan agency's website. I identified successfully. Heureka! After that I've headed to the section for editing the bank account data on the site. It asks me for a business reference number ("Geschäftszeichen"). Wait. I've never heard of this number? I've got my account credentials, I've got the ID of my loan but ... business reference number? I figure it was probably on some letter they had sent me 15 years ago of which I have no idea about its whereabouts. Remember - all I wanted to was to simply inform them of our new bank account so they could charge the correct bank account for the loan. It's aggravating how complicated they make simple things these days. What did I do to solve the problem? I fired up the IIci and WriteNow and typed/printed a letter my daughter took to the mailbox later. 15 minutes. Problem solved. Beat them with their own weapons. "The digital world makes things easier for the average person".
Last Edit: September 09, 2025, 13:26 by Bolkonskij
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snes1423
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256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina
Reply #18 on: September 09, 2025, 13:35
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getting social security here in the states is quite a chore
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #19 on: September 09, 2025, 13:53
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@Bolkonskij - Its part of an EU wide drive to establish a digital ID which allows one's activities to be conducted online whilst adhering to mandated identification procedures. I myself found out that I can't even engage in the most mundane data exchange with the tax authorities, w/o said "Personalausweis" Online ID function being activated. As of now that is still limited to government offices and a few private businesses. But very soon more and more private services will be required to "secure" your online transactions with said government issued digital ID. The argument will be of course to combat fraud, money laundering and most of all, evil Put1n. But in fact it will make it so much easier to collect all your online transactions in a single pool, for purposes of taxation and social compliance. As I said: In my federal state I can't even file my taxes online anymore, w/o using that functionality. Something they had originally promised us was to be "just an option, w/o any requirement to use it".
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #20 on: September 09, 2025, 16:23
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I feel for ya! Early this year, my REPLACEMENT debit card stolen got somehow before it arrived (my guess is mail theft). Miscreants got hold of it and activated it, which solely required calling a phone number supplied with the card and entering the card number. They racked up several thousand dollars of purchases at gas stations and Walmart and a hotel stay before it was discovered. I really hope they enjoyed all that. I'll spare you the absolute circus it took to get it straightened out, but it happened right around the end of the month, so I had to struggle to get a replacement because I pay ALL my bills auto, for practically everything via it. But, basically the bank didn't understand how their own card worked (claiming it required a PIN to activate, etc etc etc...etc) and it took innumerable phone calls (being on hold and speaking with obviously a callcenter in some foreign country with extremely thick accents reading from scripts for hours) and hours of personal visits to prove to them it wasn't me and I wasn't somehow trying to bilk them out of money. I eventually got it all straightened out, and the money returned, as they claimed I had protection from such things. But had to change my card number with about a dozen different companies, and deal with late payments and whatnot. One insurance company canceled my policy and I have yet to get it fixed. Due to how I was treated at the bank, I vowed to move my business elsewhere, but, of course, when I do so I need to go through all that again...I just haven't had the energy to do so. And, of course, now its a case of picking a "lesser of evils", since banks are banks are banks. I really want to get a new card that REQUIRES I enter my pin for use, but it seems nobody wants to provide me one, because Consumers(tm) just loves the ease of simply booping their card when make purchases. Anyway, just venting, it feels good!
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snes1423
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256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina
Reply #21 on: September 09, 2025, 19:58
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oh you think that's bad back in 1988 my aunt kept on getting letters in her mailbox when she lived in Wyoming claiming to be from the IRS saying if she didn't pay 100k to some questionable address she would have her property seized and she unfortunately is technologically illiterate and her marbles in her head are all screwed up (don't give a crazy person the internet they'll believe everything they see on google)and when she reported this too the cops they looked into it and found she didn't have to pay squat to the IRS but right after that 2 guys dressed in blue suits stole her car and left a typed letter again claiming to be from the IRS now demanding 500k to get to the point these guys turned out to be scammers who were preying on the disabled and elderly years before the world wide web and they were both 24 when they were sentenced to 40 years in prison for wire fraud and a whole bunch of other charges
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #22 on: October 09, 2025, 10:51
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As a little follow up note - I've send another paper letter to another bureaucracy and that one + the one mentioned above have done what I asked them for. Never got any confirmation but I can see they are using the correct account now. I understand it is more work for them, a clerk has to take the letter, check my details in a database, apply changes to my file etc. But seriously folks, on my end this is SO much easier then doing it the modern digital way. Just one traditional letter, print and post. I should have done this much earlier to save me the anger.
Last Edit: October 09, 2025, 11:07 by Bolkonskij
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