Category: Annoyances

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You know those people who like to bitch about “basically?” The ones who picked on “like” and “you know” (and, mercifully, seem to have given up)? I’ve got another one for them, and it ain’t “Could I get.”

Maybe it’s more prevalent in a business environment where people are asking advice and permission all the time, but the phrase “go ahead and” has really started to grate my cheese. People no longer say “I’m going to send you the form,” but “I’m going to go ahead and send you the form.” The woman across the cube wall from me actually said it twice in one sentence today–something like, “I’m going to [GAA] send you the form, and then you [GAA] fill it out and send it in.” I’ve blocked out her exact words, thank god.

Omit unnecessary words, guys. GAAh.

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Two years ago, the company I work for moved to a new office. We used to do most of our domain name registrations through Network Solutions, mainly out of habit from when they were the only registrar, and accounts were of two types:

  1. Contacts. This involved a person or role and contact information.
  2. Domain names. This involved the person or company who registered the domain name, and links to three contacts (admin, technical, and billing).

So I had a contact account for any registrations we did on our clients’ behalf. We moved – again, this was two years ago – and I updated the address.

Network Solutions has restructured their entire account system into something immensely complicated. Somehow this single contact account has been split into three separate accounts, none of which had the password I started with, and all of which had the old address.

Yes, all three redundant accounts showed the address and phone number that I deleted two years ago.

We used to have people lose their domain names (or at least get them put on hold) because they never gave NS their new address when they moved, and they wouldn’t get the renewal notice. I guess these days it doesn’t really matter. Even if you do update your address, they’ll revert it anyway.

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My dad forwarded me an opinion piece from the eWeek newsletter called Idiocy Imperils the Web. Jim Rapoza argues that – especially by now – people should really have figured out not to click on unknown attachments. My favorite quote: “Most people figure out that if they keep grabbing the electric fence, they’ll get a shock every time.”

I’ve thought along these lines for several years now. [Update: Not anymore (see below)] Once the first two waves of high-profile email viruses hit, it was time for people to wise up. Instead we have a variation on the classic joke:

Three guys walk into a bar. You’d think the third one would have ducked.

Except it’s more like “Ten guys walk into a bar. You’d think the third, fourth, fifth…”

Although I’m also reminded of a quote from Jakob Neilsen’s “Alertbox” usability column from April 1996:

The fact that the Internet doubles every year implies that at any time half of the users will have been on the net for less than a year. In other words, we are doomed to have 50 percent novice users for the foreseeable future.

This has, of course, slowed down since 1996 – recent statistics show Internet growth in the US has dropped to 5% – but it seems very unlikely that newbies can account for all – or even most – of the virus spreaders.

Yes, the responsibility rests ultimately on the jerks who write these things – but they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere without the idiots who click on them.

Update March 2023: In the 20(!) years wince I wrote this, I’ve come around to agree with Bruce Schneier’s remarks on the subject from 2011:

People get USB sticks all the time. The problem isn’t that people are idiots, that they should know that a USB stick found on the street is automatically bad and a USB stick given away at a trade show is automatically good. The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks. The problem is that the OS will automatically run a program that can install malware from a USB stick. The problem is that it isn’t safe to plug a USB stick into a computer. (emphasis added)

Yes, people absolutely need to be careful with storage they plug in, with files they download, with apps they install. Of course they do. But that only gets you so far. In addition to unintended security vulnerabilities, the software and hardware makers need to do better at not building glaring holes like auto-running malware.

I mean, just yesterday the YouTube channel for Linus Tech Tips — a channel that’s all about the tech — was taken over through malware that installed itself from a malicious PDF file and collected the session tokens from the computer’s web browsers, enabling the hackers to clone their login session and replace the channel with one promoting cryptocurrency. If YouTube — owned by Google, one of the biggest tech companies in the world — had flagged the IP-hopping or region-hopping of the login session, it could have at the very least thrown up some roadblocks.

(The number of things I just typed that wouldn’t have made any sense back in 2003…)

Admittedly, it’s hard to blame Microsoft or Google for exploding USB sticks, but I certainly wouldn’t blame the victim for it either.

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I don’t like car alarms.

Mainly it’s a matter of “crying wolf.” They go off for the stupidest reasons and don’t signify an attempted theft, so everyone ignores them. I can imagine a lot of cars have been broken into or stolen despite the alarm because people heard it and assumed it was just the usual pointless squealing.

Last night was worse. At about 12:40 AM, we were woken up by a car alarm in the parking lot, echoing between our building and the next. Figuring the owner would get down there to turn it off, we waited it out. After 5-10 minutes I figured they’d had plenty of time to throw on a robe, walk outside and deal with it. This qualified as Disturbing the Peace.

I was ready to do something I had never done before: call the cops on my neighbors. (Not that I knew which neighbors it was, but I figured they could work it out from which space the blaring car was in.) The only reason I didn’t was that it took me so long to find the non-emergency number that they had finally turned the damn thing off by the time I was ready to pick up the phone.

Hey, I didn’t want to call 911 – that would’ve just added sirens to the mix.

To top it off, every few minutes from then until 1:30 I would hear the “bleep bleep” of someone turning an alarm on and off. Just enough to knock me out of half-sleep.