Underwater Railroad

This is brilliant. I wish I'd thought of it.

There are net-based databases of people offering housing to storm refugees (I linked to one yesterday). That's great, but how do the refugees get access? Most of them don't currently have net connections, and if you've just fled your city with only what you can carry, getting back online may be a low priority compared to, y'know, food, shelter, and money.

siderea proposes the Underwater Railroad. I think this would work; it has low overhead, it distributes the workload so volunteers don't get burned out, and people anywhere can help out. She needs a little PHP help; if that's something you can help with please comment there.

login chaos

Now that we've been bought by a large company with large infrastructure, I've had to acquire quite a few more username/password pairs -- benefits site, HR site, sites for specific health providers, VPN, timesheet system, etc etc etc. (This is, of course, on top of the normal stuff -- machine login, email, etc.)

This wouldn't be so bad if all of these systems used the same pattern for the user name and maybe even the same requirements for passwords. But they don't. So there I was, trying to access one of these sites, getting "user name or password not valid" complaints, and having to try all the possible combinations of all values I could think of (because telling me which it disliked would give away too much information).

The problem turned out to be the user name. It wasn't my last name. It wasn't my email address. It wasn't my SSN. It wasn't my employee ID (actually the first thing I tried, since it was a corporate site and that's a corporate-issued ID). No -- it was the first letter of my first name plus the first four characters of my last name plus the last four digits of my SSN. I kid you not. Yeah, now that they mention it I recognize that. But who remembers stuff like that? Especially when there's exactly one system among the myriad that it applies to?

Is it any wonder that people write these things down (including passwords) or tell their browsers to take care of it?