Locked Out

This is for the "Reset Your Password" Vocal Challenge which you can read about below. Obviously, the challenge is just a prompt for me as I have been told my writing is not good enough for Vocal Challenges but what the hell, I know I can write if others refuse to see my worth.

I wonder if the fact I used "Reset My Password" in this preamble would therefore qualify the piece whatever I wrote, but I will write a short fiction that fits the challenge even though it will be ignored.

I once knew someone who when he got a pile of interview applications, threw half in the bin without checking them, saying "I want a lucky one", I wonder if Vocal do that. This is all a bit of paranoid fun, I know Vocal moderators and judges are beyond reproach.

The music I have included is "Locked Out" by Crowded House from the "Together Alone" album.

The Story

Vocal has a new challenge that needs to contain the phrase “Reset Your Password”, it's a thousand dollars and I should be able to walk it because I have written a lot and am fairly confident. I’ve been a Vocal member for a few months so I will just drop a few words together and that’ll be a thousand dollars in my pocket. Dead easy, no problem.

So I go to log in, and put in my email and password and it said “Sign In Failed” in red letters, maybe the caps lock is on or something, so I typed it in again and got the same. The caps lock was not on.

I made sure that the password was right, or what I thought it was, a combination of three three-letter words with a capital on the fourth letter, a percentage sign as the second character and a number as the penultimate character. A bit weird but memorable, well it is too me.

The only safe place for a password is in your head and it has to be something that YOU can easily remember. I know people who have complex character combinations as passwords that they have to have written down. That is an instant security risk.

I haven’t changed my password for a while, but this was not asking me to reset my password it was saying that my sign-in had failed.

When it gets to this stage I send for a password reset and waited until the reset link came through, then clicked on the link and put in a new password.

Vocal didn't like it.

“Your Password Has To Be At Least Twelve Characters”

So I added a couple of characters

“Your Password Cannot Be More Than Twelve Characters”

What the heck, the password can only be twelve characters, no more no less. How insecure is that? Hackers now know that all passwords on the system are twelve characters. Ludicrous.

OK try again

“You cannot have repeated characters in your password”

Oh my my, another ridiculous limitation. Try again, I want to get this story submitted and win my thousand dollars.

Make some adjustments.

“You Cannot Have A Name”

Well yes there is a name in there but it is part of a string so it should not matter, this is getting really annoying. More changes.

“You Cannot Have Ascending Or Descending Letter Sequences”

These are the times when you want to smash the computer screen, but it’s not the computer’s fault, it’s the bloody vocal website.

So I Try

E%vilBeas1txz

And it lets me in.

I can now enter this story.

Conclusion

This is all completely fiction and I am sure that Vocal’s password limitations are nowhere near as bad as these, but these are all limitations that I have encountered on various systems that I have used.

Good luck in the challenge everyone, I have probably shot myself in the foot with this one.