Pioneer DEH-1400UB

CD RDS Tuner with WMA/MP3 Playback and Front USB

Update: Halfords upgraded my dodgy Pioneer to a superior - and 40% more expensive - Sony, free of charge! Nice customer service.

To: The Manager
Halfords

Dear Sir or Madam,

Last November my wife purchased a Pioneer car stereo, model number DEH-1400UB, from Halfords as a birthday present for me. It was later fitted, by Halfords personnel.

Fitting took a full two hours instead of one. One reason given for this was that the mechanic did not have the necessary tools to hand. When the job was eventually completed, my new car stereo appeared to work, electrically speaking; however, it seemed mechanically to be quite loosely fitted, as the right side of the unit did not appear to be fixed to the dashboard, but just flexed in and out quite freely.

The earliest opportunity we had to get this apparent fault inspected and fixed was during the Christmas holiday break, when another mechanic showed us that one of the two fixing bolts had apparently been cross-threaded and stripped - in fact he found the missing bolt within the dashboard cavity. He told us that we would have to go to our Honda dealer and order a replacement part for this. My new car stereo unit, its mounting hole having apparently been similarly stripped during the original fitting attempt, would also have to be replaced.

The replacement part arrived and we collected it from Hamilton. Still in December (I think) we returned to Halfords, brand new Honda mounting bolt in hand, to have the replacement stereo unit fitted. This time, after the requisite hour, the unit seemed to be firmly and correctly mounted.

However

We immediately noticed that the unit was prone to skipping and jumping when playing CDs. It would also cut out entirely while the car was not even moving, e.g., while parked or stopped at traffic lights. Then in January, while driving smoothly along a main road at about 10mph, i.e. no bumps, quite suddenly three of the speakers went silent, while the fourth (offside rear) jumped up in volume and became distorted. Also, the unit’s firmware appeared to have “crashed”, as none of the controls - volume up/down, band/channel change, signal source - had any effect. Fortunately the OFF function still worked.

Upon telephoning Halfords that afternoon, we were instructed to bring the car back on Monday at 2pm, to have the unit looked at.

Meanwhile, we continued to run the unit as a radio tuner with its volume turned down to zero, so that we could at least get the functionality of a dashboard clock out of it. Then on the morning of Sunday 20th I decided, while parked, to very cautiously turn up the volume. I discovered that all four speakers were working once again. However after only a few minutes of operation at this low volume, three of them packed in again, leaving only the offside rear working, with distortion, as before. This time however the unit’s firmware did not crash, and volume up/down etc. appeared still to work.

When we telephoned again at 1pm on the Monday to confirm our upcoming visit at 2pm, we were told that the shop was “fully booked” and that we would have to pick another day. The next day (Tuesday) unfortunately being unsuitable to us, we were forced to agree on 3pm, Thursday - one full week after reporting these latest faults.

Meanwhile

On Tuesday, while parked and listening to the FM radio, I noticed the station signal fade then disappear, leaving only a little faint radio noise. I nudged the frequency up then back down exactly one single notch, using the </> buttons, which caused the unit to retune correctly. This happened several times.

On Wednesday, again while parked and listening to music from my phone using the AUX input, I noticed the volume in the right side fall to zero, then return after a minute or so. This also happened at least three times.

This purchase is now two months old, and still we have been unable to get a single day of fault-free operation out of it. In fact while driving we have been forced to continue to keep its volume at zero, in case it decides spontaneously to jump up and distort again, a terrifying prospect which could easily cause a serious accident.

Having encountered such a bewildering array of faults, I am almost at a total loss to explain them - and I have a university degree in electronics! Perhaps the unit has a secret remote control, and someone is hiding in our rear seat pressing buttons at random? And I mean every single button. That might explain it...

I say “almost” because I do have a serious theory, namely: sloppy firmware programming, combined with poor power line noise suppression. But my theories are neither here nor there, and I guess you do have many other customers happily using this same model.

Just to Recap

Recent faults have included:

• CD jumping (brand new shrinkwrapped CD, vehicle stationary)
• Spontaneous power down (while playing brand new CD)
• Triple speaker failure
• Single speaker distortion
• Complete loss of control of all functions (except power OFF)
• Tuner jumping to a random frequency (vehicle stationary)
• Right speakers fading (vehicle stationary)

We have completely lost all confidence in this particular manufacturer and model of car stereo.

Your Feature Has Been Cancelled

Or At Least Postponed

Surely that calls for a Rage Comic? I suppose we'll find out next summer, whether there's still going to be any appetite for an Office 2007 style user interface.

Maybe the more interesting question is, will there even be a desktop then?!

Oh, That Would Be A Fine Trick

After a quiet month or two, I've started hitting my stride again. I've reached my quota of four technical articles for this month, two of those security related (however vaguely). This means I can relax, and fill up the rest of June with popular culture references. Let's enjoy a couple of my favourite tricks from last year's Penn and Teller: Fool Us series. This first is by the Canadian World Champion of Magic, Shawn Farquhar:



This next shows the maestros themselves doing what they excel at. They let the audience in on both the joke and the magic, while still overfilling with enough additional indirection to ensure our ultimate bewilderment:

Implied Consent (Cookies)

What Cookies are set by this Site?

This blog is a web site, within the meaning of the EU cookie law. It uses cookies. As such, it is governed by regulations set forth by the Information Commissioner's Office. What cookies are used here, and why?

Google Analytics

...is a web service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics sets a cookie in order to evaluate how visitors find and use the web site. This feature does not collect any personal information about you. I occasionally browse the reports generated by Google Analytics in order to to evaluate just how devastatingly unpopular my blog is.

Cookies from the Blog

...which resides on the Google-owned blogger.com platform. Blogger.com sets various cookies related to that service. I don't control the dissemination of the cookies set by the blogger.com platform, except for the Google Analytics cookies explained above.

Dog Biscuit's Trading Pages

If you visit my archived Yes & Led Zeppelin bootleg trading site, some of your search preferences will be saved by cookie for your next visit. The information saved in this cookie never leaves your browser. In fact that entire site comprises nothing but static HTML pages and a bunch of exclusively client-side JavaScript; there is no server component (yes, the entire database is in that script).

I am certainly not using cookies to gather information about your browsing habits or to push advertisements at you. If you have reason to think you picked up a tracking cookie here, it might mean I've been hacked; please contact me, for example by leaving a comment on a post - anonymously if you prefer.

This has been a public service announcement made necessary by a directive of the European Commission, confusing a worthy goal (securing web users' privacy) with a particular technology (cookies).

Caring and Sharing

Who knows what possessed my friend Scale This! to seize on this particular tweet of mine, immortalising it through the medium of ceramic mug?

And What Is Truth?

In the perceived software development wars between academic ideals and commercial pressures, the first casualty, according to the ingenious definition supplied by Alfred Tarski, is unlimited satisfaction.

My first CS tutor at university, in a 1976 introductory lecture, first stressed the need to make every program solve "in some sense" the maximum possible set of problems, before going on to say Hello World in FORTRAN. Contrast that with the philosophy behind some of today's popular industrial methodologies - Agile, Test and Behaviour Driven Development - where the stated goal is to write just the minimum amount of code satisfying strictly delineated requirements.

The trouble with the lean and sparse approach is just that, assuming we know what we're doing, we do tend to design complicated systems in a modular way, ideally using plug-in replaceable components. These components need to have readily discoverable characteristics, specifications, and interfaces; they should not be capable of surprising us. In an audit scheduling application, a control for selecting a date should never be constrained to use only future dates, on the justification that audits can't be scheduled for the past (and support for past dates would require extra coding effort in the control implementation).

Evolution

Finding the happy medium can involve a certain degree of oscillation. In the early days of our company, I and others championed the idea of a Code Gallery, holding chunks of reusable Delphi; for example, utilities for date, string and other data types, or controls such as hierarchical combo boxes. For various reasons - including a span of years spent developing just a single app! - there was never a great deal in that gallery. Most of what there was, was never in fact shared with a second project.

Source control arrived, and one fine day when my back was turned, the Gallery disappeared! Absorbed whole into the repository of our flagship product. It was impossible to protest, as by then the Gallery had come to be seen as merely a mechanism allowing code sharing across projects, and this clearly wasn't happening. Personally I thought the reduced visibility of Gallery code, which was nonetheless applied across multiple disparate modules of that single app, to be an unfortunate mistake, effectively precluding any notion of testing other than the black-box kind. A more prominent Gallery, I felt, might have encouraged more unit testing, more component-level integration testing, and eventually perhaps (step 2: "?"), better modularity and re-usability (Profit!).

Departments, portfolios and personnel all change. Today we have an internal review group tasked to investigate matters like these. One new developer in particular has done much, using not only his ridiculously popular and now-famous dynamic slide shows, but more importantly his own experience of design methods, code review, sharing and reuse, to begin once again promoting awareness of our roles as both producers and consumers of each other's output. This is a good time for our department!

Ordinal Numbers and Leap Years

Linda's always been mad about Scotland's rugby squad, and just recently she's been busily accumulating points for badges on their Six Nations website to prove herself a superfan! As you can see from the above graphic, she's notching up some success in the endeavour, having collected 2,000 points and been ranked eleventy second (112nd) overall at that point.

Looks like their web dev could use a refresher on English ordinal numbers? This little exercise in natural language expression always reminds me of today's leap day calculation. It has just enough of an exceptional clause to ensure frequent failures of implementation. For every code monkey who ever forgot that last rule about years divisible by 400, another has forgotten the "teens" exception to the suffix rule,

• 1 takes "st" (so 1st, 21st, 101st, etc),
• 2 takes "nd",
• 3 takes "rd",
• everything else takes "th".

The exception is of course that any number ending in 11, 12 or 13 takes "th", instead of the corresponding suffix for 1, 2 or 3. The close analogy with leap year rules is striking, as its etymology has nothing in common with the scientific basis of the latter (which itself does have direct analogies to things like modular arithmetic, games of Monopoly, and drawing smooth inclined straight lines on a pixel raster).

Update (1st March): Since the time of writing, Linda has climbed to rank 75th nationally with 2,600 points, and been promoted from "National Squad" to "1st Cap". Problem solved!
Update (3rd March): 66th nationally, 3,100 points, promoted to "Starting XV". Girl takes her rugby seriously.

Update (17th March): 57th nationally, 4,700 points, promoted to "Captain". Meanwhile, the team collected yet another wooden spoon today.

Sony Handheld Nonportable

Vita has Flash Problem

And I don't mean Adobe. Even though discontinuing Flash development for mobile devices, Adobe are still in negotiations with Sony for a Vita version of (probably) Flash Mobile 11 - the last version they'll ever make available for phones and tablets. But Steve Jobs has driven all web video irrevocably in the direction of HTML5; and as for Flash games, well, they're mostly rubbish on wee displays like the Vita's 5" OLED capacitive touchscreen anyway. No, the issue I'm referring to is this new announcement from Sony, that the PS Vita will require the use of proprietary memory cards. And just why exactly might that be? A Sony spokesperson explains: [we are] using proprietary memory cards, both for security reasons, and to ensure a consistent experience for all users.

Ah right, security reasons, of course. And yes, a consistent user experience. Always thinking about its beloved users, Sony is. About their security. And about the consistency of their experience. So, we should expect these proprietary sticks to be priced similarly to existing, industry standard flash memory cards, right?


Prices are in dollars. Source: Amazon.com, except for Sony prices, which are current listings at Gamestop.

Hunter Two

Via bash.org

I telephoned the 90s, and overheard this chat on IRC:

[Cthon98] hey, if you type in your password, it will show as stars
[Cthon98] ********* see!
[AzureDiamond] hunter2
[AzureDiamond] doesn't look like stars to me
[Cthon98] [AzureDiamond] *******
[Cthon98] that's what I see
[AzureDiamond] oh, really?
[Cthon98] Absolutely
[AzureDiamond] you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
[AzureDiamond] haha, does that look funny to you?
[Cthon98] lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
[AzureDiamond] that's neat, I didnt know IRC did that
[Cthon98] yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
[AzureDiamond] awesome!

(pause)

[AzureDiamond] wait, how do you know my password?

(pause)

[Cthon98] I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause it's your password
[AzureDiamond] oh, ok.

Focus!

A Fortuitous Juxtaposition

RSS readers will have missed the coincidence of expression in my Technology sidebar today, where these two articles from different Microsoft blogs collided:

Nice to know the Key to Success at Microsoft is not something that you need to steal.

Contrafactuals

Say It Don't Spray It

Just saw a mock up of a PowerPoint presentation for a proposed new product. Although it was thrown together in that Lorem Ipsum fashion (don't you just love his dresses?), still it was amusing how the bullet points conspired by chance to tell the diametric opposite of the truth about this baby. Economic gains? In fact this solution would be more expensive than traditional ones. Reduced paperwork? More sort of increased, actually. Environmental impact? Do this one yourself...

But I'm Tryin', Ringo

The Path of the Righteous



Jules in Pulp Fiction is having a hard time interpreting Ezekiel 25:17, as three conflicting analyses compete for his approval. And this morning, one month after Microsoft's Cloud Data Breach, we find ourselves in a perfectly analogous quandary. How to interpret this Windows Azure spam promotional email from Reading?

Come in We're Still OPEN

At first I thought they were trying to reassure me, that despite the forementioned breach of customers' confidential data security, "We're still trading! Yes I know, it's incredible! We're still in business!"

Then, Colleague P suggested it might instead indicate the ongoing status of that breach: "Customer data still available! We're still w-i-d-e open!"

But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is - upon subsequent, more sober reflection - that the intended interpretation (becoming clear only after you read into it at least a little further) is just this: "We are open 24/7/365." Still open, in other words, during holidays.

Windows Azure: We're Still Open. What an odd email to receive, as Tweeter CloudClip-Azure muses. You can't help bracing yourself for the inevitable and apparently imminent follow-up promotion. Windows Azure: Closing Down Sale.

A famous advertising campaign in the mid-1980s, by the now defunct British Rail, and sporting the tag line We're Getting There, was universally ridiculed from its launch day. This Azure email campaign seems almost as easily avoidable a case of foot-in-mouth as that one.

Your Fave Browser

An Arresting Ambiguity

Today's "Technology" sidebar has a new number one, which caught my attention:

Parallel Programming with .NET
- Parallel Computing Virtual Labs on MSDN

Clicking through to Stephen Toub's introduction, I'm immediately whisked along by his infectious enthusiasm:

Interested in trying out the support for parallel computing in Visual Studio 2010 or .NET 4, but don’t have either installed? No problem. You can now use the MSDN Virtual Labs site to try these out from the comforts of your favorite browser.

All right! Actually I do have both installed, but no matter, this looks like fun. My favourite browser is currently Firefox, so I should be able to right-click, Open Link in New Tab, then launch one of the five parallel computing virtual labs on offer...


Okay, so I guess that answers that whole question about "how can they do that without ActiveX?" They can't. But the part I hadn't realised before, is that whenever a Microsoft guy says your favorite browser, he means IE6!

Don't Hit Me With Your Modem

Today's Apposite Dilbert

Found a Hayes fax modem in the miscellaneous cables & assorted hardware sports bag, during the annual clean & throw out. Here's a picture of it:

Also found a couple of wireless routers, two Sharp pocket computers from the 80s, a pre-USB Laplink cable (wow, serial RS-232C and Centronics parallel!), it's all good...

Dilbert ©2010, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Strangely Reassuring

Update (Dec 13): Bonus Material - On Ledes

When Warren Ellis saw the New Scientist article Mystery 'dark flow' extends towards edge of universe, he reacted to its opening sentence, "Something big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe", with the immortal and appreciative "Now that’s how to write a fucking lede."

Now in his Lede Of The Day, he makes his own contribution to the Plain English Lede society, in his reaction to the somewhat conservatively stated arXiv article, First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation:

Let me translate this lede from arXiv for you.
Evidence that our universe has been struck by four other universes.

I hear the faint rustlings of a new meme... following the Chuck Norris template. Compare:

• When Chuck Norris crosses the road, the traffic looks both ways.
• Superfluous adjectives, particularly colours, avoid Warren Ellis.

Cage Against The Machine

Pray Silence for Baby Jesus!

Not that I'd recommend this particular social networking site to anyone; no indeed, not even to my own worst enemy (who incidentally just missed her 85th birthday party, due to flu; do get well soon, Margaret). But I've just had the pleasure of joining a Facebook group, entitled JOHN CAGE'S 4'33'' FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE 2010:

http://www.facebook.com/cageagainstthemachine

This one simply mixes together far, far too many subjects so near and dear to my heart. Primarily, puns: Cage Against The Machine, that's only priceless. Then, there's the avant-garde. And specifically, the music and other sundry ambient stylings of one Mr John Cage.

Then too there's the commercialisation of Christmas. Which actually, to an agnostic like me, is just a convenient placeholder for rampant, wasteful and ultimately pointless consumerism. But it's there, it's in the mix of what makes this story so irresistible.

Above all, there is the bottom-dredging trawler damage done annually, and throughout the year, by the giant black hole of popular culture, the musical dead zone, the infecting, suppurating, all-extinguishing oil slick, that is Simon Cowell and his X-Factor.

About "4:33"

For the uninitiated, John Cage's musical composition 4'33" is made up of four and a half minutes of complete silence. Or rather, of whatever ambient noise happens to become generated by a suitably sized orchestra, sitting in their seats in a fully occupied concert hall, and concentrating entirely upon doing absolutely nothing for that particular length of time.

The new campaign follows last Christmas's successful Internet based promotion of Rage Against The Machine's song Killing In The Name, that managed to deny X Factor contagion Joe McElderry's The Climb the Christmas number one slot to which some rich, wastelaying suits with haircuts thought it was entitled.

This time around, we are being asked to purchase instead a digital copy of John Cage's silent classic. What a perfect statement that would be, and how beautifully spotless an irony, should the bandwagon that has brutally silenced the once traditional battle for that Christmas No.1 spot, find itself - quite literally - silenced in its turn.

There's just one fly in the balm. Presumably, certain of the profits from the expected avalanche of sales would go to The John Cage Trust. Now, these people are the publishers who trolled a six figure settlement out of our very own Mike Batt, for his track "A One Minute Silence". Said track consists of, that's right, one minute of silence; and it is credited, whether in fun or in homage or both, to "Batt/Cage". Yes, yes, I know, such royalty trolling is nothing new in the music business. But this one case has always struck me as a particularly egregious example of the extortionist's art, the meritless extraction of money with menaces; it will pain me to make this purchase. As nevertheless I must, when the time comes.

One Last Thing

Oh, and to anyone else in the office who's reading this: I think it might be best if I don't take part in the Secret Santa this year, not after this little outburst anyway. So, Humbug to all that, don't you agree?

Update, 12/12: Shit. Bloody X-Factor winner is one of my favourite Biffy Clyro songs. And it's an even better version than the mighty Biff (though NME's Luke Lewis would disagree). Now I'm threatening both to boycott and to buy it...

This Is Your Alarm Call

I Don't Believe It!

We are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which probably reduces cold calling, but has never quite seemed to stop it. Normally I just ask callers to repeat their identification details, then inform them of our TPS status, and the sizes of the fines involved, before bidding them good evening.

But last night's call was a classic of its kind. As always, Caller ID showed the calling number "Withheld", but I answered anyway. A woman's voice began, "Hello Mr Kerr, I'm calling from the Home Research Group. We have been given four free home alarm systems, courtesy of [company name], and you have been selected to receive one. Can you confirm your address for us? Would you be interested in a free home alarm system?" And as I asked for her to repeat the names of the parties involved, she continued to ask, "Do you have a home alarm system?"

I said, "I'd prefer not to discuss my home security provisions with you, if that's all right."

"Oh, I see. Is it something that you might be interested in?"

Aha! Suddenly it transformed into a sales call after all. At this point, I was on the verge of asking the caller for her own home address and phone number, and whether or not she had installed a house alarm. Instead I just repeated, "Actually I'd rather not discuss my home security arrangements with you."

"Oh, okay then. So I'll just pass it on?"

"Good idea. You do that. Bye."

Some days I think I'm indistinguishable from my dad.

Update, 9 Oct: they phoned again, this time a guy... so, as soon as he'd confirmed my residential details and asked if I had a home alarm system, I demanded to know his full name and home address, type of property, and whether or not he currently has a home alarm system.

- "Why would you want to know that, sir?"
- "Well exactly, why on Earth would I want to give out that kind of information to a complete stranger?"
- "But I have identified myself to you, sir."
- "Then why is your telephone number withheld?"

Today I finally did report them to TPS; they should expect a five-figure fine. And just in case you think that's harsh treatment of someone just trying to make a living out of a boiler room telemarketing job, please note that this is the company I'm talking about.

Picture taken at Vendsyssel Historiske Museum in Hjørring, Denmark © 2004 by Tomasz Sienicki

O God, O New Scientist!

Schrödinger's Cat Observed

New Scientist magazine, in the printed, dead-tree edition, has a regular snarky page which lovingly details the copious nonsense and hilarious mistakes often reported in the press under the guise of some or other scientific principle or theory.

Sometimes though, I have to despair for the journalistic and editorial standards of New Scientist itself. As for instance in the current issue, where a moderately interesting article on foundational research in quantum physics offers examples of "physical predictions that are confirmed time and time again by experiment".

The third of these examples: "cats that remain suspended between life and death as long as we don't look at them".

LOL... I had no idea that one had been directly verified, in experiments using actual cats!

Photo credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Title credit: Psalm of Montreal, Samuel Butler, 1878.

Naked Physics

Update: I just checked Google Analytics, and this here entry had 38 (discrete!) hits yesterday. It also happens to be linked from my comment to Raymond's article, which is, you guessed it, comment number 39. I've always said: blogs are the world's first write-only medium.

The Old New Thing's Raymond Chen threw down the gauntlet this week, challenging any and all comers to come up with a real-world, actually-happened, physics-related pun, even more lame than his own prize sample. To give you an idea of the level of competition involved, his example involved meeting two colleagues named "Paul" in the works kitchen, allowing him to quip "Oh no, is this legal? I think it's a violation of the Paul Exclusion Principle."

Beat that for lame, eh? Easy.

I attended the Summer School for an Open University physics - sorry, natural philosophy - course some years (ok, decades) ago. It was held at the University of Sussex, near beautiful Brighton, sunny Sussex by the sea. At that time, the area was famous for hosting the one and only nudist beach in Britain. So on the evening of the first day, a group of us decided to grab our Kodak Instamatic 126es, and go for an off-campus drive (I was easily led). Just to see what we could see...

Never mind what we saw, that's completely irrelevant! We saw the sea. The point is that we made good our "escape", without getting arrested (nor forced to strip).

When we arrived back at the halls of residence, we encountered one of the physics - sorry, natural philosophy - tutors, whom we recognised from earlier in the day. At that time, he'd been telling us about energy levels in the atom, which can either be spaced a quantum apart (discrete), or else overlap (degenerate). We now offered to buy him a drink at the students' bar, and in the course of subsequent conversation, he happened to ask where we'd been earlier in the evening.

We told him we'd gone looking for the nudist beach, but we reckoned we'd managed to get away again without anyone spotting us.

"I see," he said thoughtfully, "you guys are quite degenerate. And yet quite discrete."

Disclaimer: parts of this story are true.
Bonus material: We also have two Pauls in our office. Fortunately they have opposing values of spin.

The Artichoke of Attack

They Shallot Pass

Onion, that steadfast, reliable, archetypal model of network security, was reportedly receiving therapy today, having broken down in tears after this stinging and allegedly unprovoked attack by Cisco network consulting engineer Kurt Grutzmacher: "You used to hear about hackers having to peel away at the network’s onion layers, but in the borderless environment, that analogy does not apply."

"We gave service for years, decades even, to modelling the typical network's defences against threats and vulnerabilities" said a tearful Onion, in an apparent reference to its ofttimes colleague, Wild Leek. "Suddenly Cisco's mid-year security report comes out, and this guy's all like, It's not onions any more, it's more of an artichoke. I mean, WTF? So we're being replaced... by a fucking thistle?"

A representative from the pair's legal firm, Scallions Garlic and Chives, was later quoted as saying "We are naturally disappointed by Cisco's decision. We have many members, far more capable of representing attack surfaces in this new, so-called borderless environment. This could all have been better handled without going outside the family. The new Artichoke guy, sure he sounds tough, but underneath it all, he's not that hard. We call him Cisco's Thistle. But he ain't even got no sting."

In other news, ogres are expected to continue to have layers; donkeys, not so much.

Sacramento Credit Union

Working on the assumption that everyone reading this blog will get the joke, the following is excerpted from the Sacramento Credit Union's Online Access General FAQs:

https://homebank.sactocu.org/UA2004/faq-mfa.htm#pp6

Why are the Security Questions used?

The first time you login and enroll in Protection Plus, you will be asked to enter five Security Questions and corresponding answers. The Security Questions are used if you do not want to register the computer you are currently using. With the Security Questions, we can make sure it is you logging in when you use different computers, such as, a internet bar computer.

The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.”

Why can’t I use certain words like "drop" as part of my Security Question answers?

There are certain words used by hackers to try to gain access to systems and manipulate data; therefore, the following words are restricted: "select," "delete," "update," "insert," "drop" and "null".