Yahoo Mail Increases Security On Password Resets
Yahoo, and other online companies, have been exposed lately as being a little bit weak in some areas of security in regards to some of their online offerings.
Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin had her Yahoo email account "hacked" by a kid who used the Yahoo Mail password reset function to gain access to the email account. He was able to do because all it took to get a password reset was knowing the answers to couple of personal questions.
As a public figure, the answers to Palin’s questions were probably easier to come by than most. Still, it raised the possibility that anyone with a little bit of effort could probably do the same thing to a significant majority of Yahoo account owners.
How long would it take someone to find out where you were born, or where you went to high school? The answer is, not long, especially with so many people willingly posting that same information on sites like Facebook or Twitter.
That is why I have always preferred websites that offer me the chance to make up my own security questions. Someone could be able to find out what my high school mascot was, or what the make and model of the first car I owned was. (Seriously, think about it for a few seconds. Birth year plus 16 or 17 years. Now all you need is an archive of the DMV records from those years. It might even be online as an open records request.)
On the other hand, I doubt anyone would be able to find out what we nicknamed the big piece of cement in the filed behind our house by accessing even the best government databases.
Twitter was similarly hacked by someone who was a bit more clever, but simply preying on a weak spot of security. The hacker re-applied for a Hotmail account and then asked Google Mail for a password reset which was sent to, you guessed it, the Hotmail account.
It’s ironic that these services go through so much trouble to get you to choose a difficult password and then make it so easy to get around the password.
It was these type of high profile events that made me a bit squeamish about what kind of information (like a detailed, dated list of all my time tracking information) I’ve been sending out into "the cloud" under nothing more than the slight security offered by a username and password combination.
Anyway, Yahoo is making at least a little bit of effort in this area. Recently when I tried to logon to my Yahoo Mail account a screen popped up asking me for a cell phone number to use for verification in the event I needed a password reset or have my account unlocked. They also asked for the ubiquitous two security questions.
They didn’t offer me the opportunity to create my own questions, but a look at the list confirms that the days of everyone using the same questions to ask the same publicly available information to get a master key to the security locks on your account are, thankfully, coming to an end.
Reopen Last Browsing Session Internet Explorer 8 By Default
I’m not a huge Internet Explorer fan. IE 8.0 is better than the unremarkable IE 7 and light years better than the virtually unusable IE 6, but, it still chock full of annoying quirks and weird Internet Explorer functions.
The latest nuisance comes courtesy of the Reopen Last Browsing Session feature, or more specifically the fact that there is no way to automatically reopen last browsing session. (Although there is a way to disable reopen last browser session if you want to do that.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m finally glad to see this functionality in Internet Explorer. It’s bad enough for your browser to crash, but it really stinks for it to erase all of those open websites you worked so hard to find.
If you haven’t used IE 8 Reopen Last Browsing Session yet, it is probably because it isn’t really all that obvious that IE even has that feature, especially if you remember trying to find something like that in earlier IE versions and came up empty. It isn’t a leap to assume that something that was missing last time is missing this time. (Click the little gear icon that means settings or functions or something, and it’s the first choice at the top.)
It does say “Restore Last Browsing Session” on the screen that appears when you open a new tab, but if you use your browser a lot, or if you use another browser, chances are, you’ve been using tabs for so long, that you didn’t see the need to read whatever Microsoft decided to add once they decided it was a feature worth copying.
Ironically, for many users, having the option on a new tab is too late. For example, I use the same feature in Firefox (which has had it for years, now) to help remind me of the things I was working on when I last shutdown my computer or browser. If I had two more sources to go through, but it was getting really late, I would just leave those two tabs open. When I started Firefox the next time, those two tabs would pop up right away and remind me to finish out the work I was doing. That keeps me from having to write down a list, or put a sticky note on my monitor, or whatever.
Internet Explorer does not restore the last browsing session by default. Microsoft says that this is because they carefully considered all the options and decided that for privacy reasons, it would be better if the last session did not automatically open when you opened IE.
That is fine with me. I can see the arguments on both sides and certainly cannot fault anyone for coming down once way or another. What is annoyingly preposterous is that there is no way for a user to customize this behavior and configure IE to do what they chose. In other words, Microsoft has decided that, not only is it better to not display the last session by default, but that users are so stupid and inferior to Microsoft’s user interface design team that we shouldn’t even be given the choice!
One more time for the cheap seats, LET ME DECIDE HOW TO USE MY SOFTWARE ON MY COMPUTER!
You see, as it turns out, I am reasonably intelligent. I can learn new things, figure things out, and yes, even use a computer that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. I can guard my own privacy. I can use Private Mode browsing. I can delete cookies. I can delete history. I can use CCleaner. In other words, I don’t need Microsoft to be my mommy and wipe my nose and watch out for my privacy. Just give me the tools to handle it myself (like Private Browsing Mode) and then let me handle it myself.
For Microsoft to assume what the best way for my software to be configured for me is patronizing and infuriating. I know Microsoft is used to the people using its products being the non-computer savvy drones who just use whatever they have at work, or whatever comes installed on their computer by default; but if Microsoft ever wants the respect of people who actually know even a little bit about computers, then it needs to stop treating us like incompetent drooling monkeys.
Give me an about:config screen like Firefox. Put the choice behind a button that says “Advanced”. I don’t care what you do, just do something.
But don’t you dare decide what is best for me!
Disable Reopen Last Browsing Session IE 8 – Internet Explorer How To
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get Internet Explorer to automatically reopen last browsing session instead of having to click on Tools –> Reopen all of the time. (Yes, I know I can set about:tabs to be my home page or a bookmark and click on Reopen Last Browsing Session there, but that is still manual even if it isn’t hidden in a menu.)
What I did find is that you can disable reopen last browsing session feature in Internet Explorer 8 completely if you want to.
How To Disable Reopen Last Browsing Session Menu
Go into the registry (if you don’t know how, you shouldn’t be messing with it anyway).
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery
Add a new DWORD value named NoReopenLastSession
Set its value to 1
That is all it takes.
Check this out if you want to set IE8 to reopen last browsing session automatically by default whenever Internet Explorer 8 is opened.
Bizarre Internet Explorer 8 Favorites Quirk
How weird is this?
I’m using Internet Explorer 8 today; not by choice, but because some Microsoft websites whine about you using other browsers and I was doing research for a Microsoft related article. I have a favorite of the page I want to open. (The proper term is bookmark, but Microsoft insists on pretending that they invent everything, including all the stuff they steal from other software, so they didn’t use the term bookmark, like everyone else.) So, I press CNTRL+B.
Now, Control + B is actually the keyboard shortcut for another browser (Firefox). As proof that Microsoft knows full well what the real terminology for a saved Internet location in a browser should be, CTL+B opens the "Organize Favorites" window in Internet Explorer. This is a nice touch of Microsoft user interface usability from the boys in Redmond to understand that those of who don’t just use the software that came preinstalled on our computers are very likely to be used to the keyboard shortcuts of other browsers.
Still, it’s a little bit unexpected, because I’m expecting the sidebar or toolbar, or whatever that opens when you click on the little gold start to show up, but the Favorites window is fine, too. What is very weird, however, is trying to open a bookmark from this window.
Technically, the Organize Favorites window is not where you are supposed to be browsing and opening your favorites from. Nonetheless, following the standard Windows user interface paradigm, right-clicking on a bookmark brings up a context window which includes the option to Open the IE favorite that was clicked on.
At this point, I’m a little bit bummed, because what I really want to do is open the bookmark in a new tab, but it is still better than nothing, so I choose Open from the pop-up menu and…nothing.
I choose Open again. Again, nothing happens. After a few tries, I roll my eyes, give up, close the Organize Favorites window, click on the gold star, and open the bookmark from the sidebar. A few minutes later I switch over to Firefox for something else, and notice that there are 4 tabs open. Those four tabs are the ones that opened when I chose open.
Seriously?
Just to prove it to myself I tried it again, and sure enough, choosing Open from the context menu in Organize Favorites in IE 8 opens the bookmark in Firefox.
It is undoubtedly because Firefox is set as my default browser, but I still assumed that choosing Open in a IE favorites window would open the favorite in Internet Explorer.
I wonder if this behavior is intentional, or if in all of their testing, no one ever noticed this behavior. It is likely a felony at Microsoft HQ to have another browser installed as your default browser, so maybe it just never came up. Either way, Microsoft amused me today.
