Bimbong has been very busy. Evidently robots can hog the comment conch even when the things don’t actually go through.

I’ve never heard of being required by a website to “talk about” something. It actually wanted you to, in your own words, describe a thing that you purchased? If that happened to me I would change the subject and start telling it about my problems just to force somebody to read it.

Face book, inventor of the world famous sport bohcahini, allows a person to disable its random gibberish password prompts, but only if you own a cellular telephone, which it assumes everybody does, much as imdib assumes everybody has purchased something from an amazon. And I imagine people have no problem just calling up face book and saying “yeah, it’s me! Turn that off!”

On a related topic, the book of faces is serious about name changes.

Thank you for telling me I have a real e-mail address, face book! But if I didn’t know, who told you?

Concerning the personal information, that’s actually rather distressing. I sense this may be a trend among film review related websites, however. I recently tried to respond to a rare non-stupid comment on the Internet Movie Database only to be asked to “verify” my (already long existing) account, either by talking about my last Amazon.com purchase (which has to have been almost three years ago) or by giving them my credit card number. That wasn’t happening.

This website, on the other hand, has once again taken upon itself to yell at me to “slow down” with my comments. Such nerve.

Eh, the point was that the thing had no place to be griping about my address, or any data that was inconsequential to the dissemination of daft film reviews.

I gradually inserted an air of legitimacy, but the thing was awfully pedantic. It would not accept fake street names, it would not accept real street names with numbers beyond an unspecified range, it would not accept invalid area codes, it would not accept valid area codes with just any random numbers following. Zip codes are one thing, it’s easy to get those. And I do not dispute that there’s probably some moderately simple way to devise a template for determining realistic phone codes, if not just every telephone number right out of a telephone directories, but it’s creepy that these companies are allowed to get them. They already have all the numbers. They already have all the addresses. All they need now is to trick us into matching ourselves up with these things on a webpage we didn’t know we’re at with tiny print that says what’s happening so a legal argument can be made that consumers willingly signed up for whatever awful thing it is.

When I did give it my old, actual zip code, it automatically changed “dumpsteropolis” to “east haven.” The only thing it would let me get away with was my name, and also the state; it changed Arizoner to AZ but that was all. I imagine eventually these things will develop to the point where they can know that a name doesn’t match an address or a telephone sequence. This won’t make a difference to people who just enter all their true information all over the place… on the scam form itself. Information like that would be more helpful for luring people to the thing. Like now it uses the email addresses and names of people it thinks you know. If it could find out actual, likely personal acquaintances… it still probably wouldn’t make a difference because people download viruses from random, foreign sources all the time. This is comforting to know.

Alternately, the site may merely have had an list of valid ZIP codes to compare your data with (I recall even a few legitimate services which did not ask for the full address using these in the past). Perhaps if you inserted a legitimate one of these (if not necessarily your own), the rest of your data would be accepted. Assuming you were particularly keen on being scammed, of course.