{"id":37,"date":"2008-03-05T15:46:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-05T21:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/05\/ridiculous-account-requirements-on-sprintpcscom\/"},"modified":"2008-03-05T15:46:30","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T21:46:30","slug":"ridiculous-account-requirements-on-sprintpcscom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/05\/ridiculous-account-requirements-on-sprintpcscom\/","title":{"rendered":"Ridiculous Account Requirements on SprintPCS.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a break from my regular vein of [not] posting, but I&#8217;m livid enough that I need to write this. I&#8217;ve had SprintPCS cell phone service since 2003, and have been generally pleased with the service. It&#8217;s all subjective, of course, but I haven&#8217;t had real issues with dropped calls, and their data services (1xrtt, evdo) have been quite good to me. I log in to their web site regularly to check my account, pay bills etc, and it&#8217;s worked perfectly for the past several years. Apparently that was unsatisfactory for Sprint.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Today when I tried to go pay my bill, I logged in as I always do. However, instead of being greeted by my regular account overview page, today I was faced with a page instructing me that I was being required to create NEW account credentials. I tried to create my regular username, and was informed that I could not use any special characters (i.e. an underscore). Although this is a pretty dumb restriction already, I have run into this on various sites, so I was willing to accept this and go on with my life (and without any special characters in my username).<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s where the real stupidity began. A few keystrokes later, I had modified my username to eliminate any malicious characters like underscores, and was naturally proceeding to enter my password. Sprint had other plans. Apparently it&#8217;s not good enough to have a <q>secure<\/q> password any more&#8211;usernames must <em>also<\/em> meet complexity requirements. (If you&#8217;re not familiar with the term, this is the general name for all the crazy rules like <q>Your password must be at least eight characters, but no more than nine, must contain three letters, two numbers, at least two special characters, and cannot contain a word or portion of a word.<\/q>) What? Complexity requirements FOR MY USERNAME? I guess we should just have two password fields now. Or maybe three (more on that later). I briefly tried hacking their javascript, but was unsuccessful, so now my username can be described by the following formula:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[regular username] &#8211; [<q>special<\/q> characters] + 1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>:sigh: (I guess I should just be thankful that my username at least [barely] met the length requirements.)<\/p>\n<p>I started to enter my password, and was shocked to see the letters appearing as readable text on the screen! I guess the people designing this application have never used a computer with another person in the room, or they might have considered that was a bad idea. Don&#8217;t worry too much, though &#8230; once you click on the field, the password turns into asterisks. I guess it must have been <q>fun with JavaScript<\/q> day at the Sprint development office. :roll-eyes:<\/p>\n<p>Lastly, there&#8217;s the PIN. As if the password-like requirements for the username, and the password itself weren&#8217;t enough, I&#8217;m now apparently required to create another PIN &#8230; even though I already had one. But this one must be <em>more secure<\/em> because it has to be stupidly long, unlike every other four-digit PIN since the beginning of time. I feel so safe knowing that I now have three SUPER SECURE identifiers for accessing my account &#8230; two of which were emailed to me (in cleartext, obviously) immediately following their creation.<\/p>\n<h2>THANKS SPRINT!!<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a break from my regular vein of [not] posting, but I&#8217;m livid enough that I need to write this. I&#8217;ve had SprintPCS cell phone service since 2003, and have been generally pleased with the service. It&#8217;s all subjective, of course, but I haven&#8217;t had real issues with dropped calls, and their data services [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}