HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

I finally bought a Barnes & Noble membership today. Despite almost always buying my books on the Amazon, (a site I much prefer referring to with the definite article “the” intact because it sounds cooler), I occasionally will pick one up from B&N if I really want a book that. day. I was buying $55 or so in books, with one being a bestseller which means 40% off, so I was looking at just over $10 off with a membership. $15 for a membership, sure, whatever.

In trying to link my new account from the store with an online account, it prompts for a security question. I select “mother’s middle name” since things like “what’s your favorite restaurant?” are ridiculously inane as I’ll almost *certainly* forget what I entered, which will promptly be followed by feelings of wanting to stab someone. And then I enter ma’s middle name: marie. Nevermind that the security answer is CaSe SeNsItIvE, (because, clearly, I should also be forced to remember if I proper-cased my answer) it goes ahead and tells me:

Great. Now Barnes & Noble is calling me a liar AND insulting my mother. Swimming performance there, kids. [Really, the error message reads as follows: Your Security Answer is not formatted properly. A Security Answer must be 6–15 characters long, spaces allowed. Remember that Security Answers are case sensitive (i.e., "Dickens" is not the same as "dickens").]

The moral of the story? Don’t enforce ridiculous limitations on a security question if the user’s correct answer might violate those limitations. And don’t insult your customer’s mothers. (CrunchGear blogged about this too, some two weeks ago.)

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tagged with: amazon, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, fail, liars, mothers, passwords, Security, security questions, user experience

Posted in: Design, Rants

GigaOM caught up with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at the D6 conference this week. A lot of people on Wall Street have been struggling to make the somewhat obvious connection between Amazon as a retailer and Amazon as a web service provider. The background to the concept is really pretty self-evident: Amazon needed to develop amazing tools for their own internal scalability and data management needs and in doing so, determined they could scale those tools, make them available to developers for their own applications and commoditize the marketplace. So they did, as we describe after the jump.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: amazon web services, amazon.com, aws, ec2, gigaom, ilike, jeff bezos, ommalik, s3, scalability

Posted in: Tech News