Drowning in tech process, instead of what I want to do which is ‘achieving stuff’.
I want to make a PayPal payment. Not too much to ask, you might have thought. I have been doing it for decades. Paypal have made their login somewhat more clunky and difficult over the years but not nearly as much as some other people have.
Last weekend Virgin Media retired my broadband hub and had me install a new one. That was pretty much plug-and-play (although I haven’t tried the Squeezeboxes yet). Logging into PayPal is straightforward - e-mail and password. The last clunk they added was 2FA via my landline, which is fine (I don’t use PayPal on the move). The way it works is that they phone, I key in a code from my desktop screen, they thank me and wish me ‘Goodbye’. Easy.
Today we get through the e-mail and password and the on-screen message says, as always, that they’ll phone me. The message confirms a few digits of my landline number. But the phone doesn’t ring. Hmm. I call it from my mobile and it does ring, so the landline’s fine.
I phone PayPal from my mobile. The robot which answers quickly confesses its own uselessness and connects me to a woman in a distant call centre. She is perhaps the most ‘reciting from a script’ person I’ve ever spoken (for want of a better word) with. She can see that my e-mail is for real and that I’ve entered my password correctly. She then tries some stuff to clear the login block. It doesn’t work. Quite a bit of time is on mute as she asks her manager what to try next (she’s not got the hang of the mute button so I hear a little of it). The last thing she tries involves using my mobile to scan a QR. I point out that I don’t have the internet on my mobile (don’t ask - you think this is a long irritating ramble ?). We go on mute. For a long time. The call times out.
This rings half a bell. Something to do with your landline no longer actually being a landline, it’s now effectively a VOIP device and can’t take certain types of call.
I am by no means an expert but I seem to recall MiL running into the same problem after she upgraded to turbo nutter broadband.
Might have been, but no. They changed my landline to VoIP ages (more than a year ?) ago. I buy something with Paypal every week or two, including Lopwell lottery tickets. It’s worked fine. I changed the VM hub on Sunday. PayPal has now shat itself. For what it’s worth, script lady reckoned that the new hub would be the problem.
She has my e-mail on record. All she has to do is e-mail me through the security check. She has my landline number on record. All she has to do is call that and take me through the security.
But no. These are the days of slavery to the mobile. All she can imagine is sorting this out with the mobile. Perhaps I should have suggested she call me on the landline and I would hold the handset up to the mobile and she could talk herself through the process ?
UPDATE: I let them SMS me a security code and since this was to a mobile (whose number they didn’t have 'til now) their night terrors have been calmed and they will let me use Paypal again.
Enrolling, against my better judgement, in the government’s One Basket For All Your Eggs SPOF-based ‘GOV.UK One’ wheeze
Of course it’s a public sector IT scheme, so doomed to be awful (maybe they’ve involved Fujitsu ?). But it did involve me pitching up at my local Post Office with my passport and being stood against a wall and photographed. I also had to register my tracking tag (mobile phone) with them. So I guess it will be handy for Reform if they get in, allowing them to follow me around and to cut me off from all government services at the press of a single button if I should be found to have gone online and called them twats. The twats.
I had no choice. I need to file a return for a limited company and the straightforward way of doing that has been abolished.
I have a passport and driver’s licence in any case, so they have my mugshot already, and they’ve had a presence inside the mobile phone companies certainly since the end of the 80’s. So I’ve probably not handed over anything they couldn’t already tap into.
The problem is, the auto-entrepreneur site gives you about 6 different options, and where you need to go for which bits is a sea of insane confusion. The French system is in fact absolute bollocks.
I think I’m of the opinion that we now need a reliable, secure digital ID system.
We are implicitly at war with Russia, with them manipulating social media to foment unrest. Linking the ability to post to social media to an actual verified ID (even if anonymity is allowed) is becoming necessary.
I’m entirely willing to have my mind changed, and for unintended consequences to be highlighted, but I’m fucking scared of Farage becoming PM and deporting my neighbours and friends, and if a bit of a loss of liberty is what we need to prevent this, then maybe that’s what we need to do.
That’s also the immediate counter-argument, I think. The minute Farage becomes PM, he gets access to, and can fuck with, any such system.
There’s a real lack of thinking (especially in Silicon Valley) about what a bad actor could do with a system. Facebook is a classic example there, there was a time where you could search and basically obtain a list of companies that had people who identified as gay working there. And that applied to anywhere in the world, so anyone in Iran who thought they’d been safe with a somewhat anonymous account could suddenly find themselves in a world of hurt.
As an addendum, I’m never quite sure with AI companies what’s marketing hype or not, but Anthropic holding back Mythos because if how effective it was at exposing security vulnerabilities, and the US Gov then putting blocks on their latest bleeding edge actual release are potentially rare events of somewhere thinking about possible consequences.
I’ve been massively impressed by what Claude AI can do, nothing on the scale of that but it’s done an absolutely fantastic job of analyzing log files and providing root causes, putting together very complex requirements from regulations and emulating Cisco configs etc.
Previously I’d have to create a big lab config in Cisco modeling and configure them but now I just throw the config at Claude and ask what would happen if xxxxx
You are kissing your AI ? I dread to think what will happen.
If you’d told me 15 years ago that one of these people would be the reason that respectable grown-ups would have to buy burner phones before traveling to ‘the land of the free’ I’d have thought you’d been swallowing the bad acid. Now it’s happened. Really it has. We should just take a moment and think about that
I couldn’t do fast either, I’m a sprinter so 5k plus distances tear any speed out of me. That said I found the bigger foundation of running volume at slow speeds I did, was the most effective prep to then improve my best times, if I did these sparingly.
Yeah, I totally understand that, I was a sprinter at school, and was always top 3 over 100 & 200.
It’s a mental battle for 5km for me, the thoughts of ‘you know what i’ll stop now’ never go away!
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