Amazon: amateurs

Just because Amazon is marginally less rubbish than other shops, does not make them any good.  They are going further and further down the path of being obstinately unable to authenticate their own customers, forcing re-"authentication" after re-"authentication", insulting time-wasting crap as displacement for being unable to authenticate.  Yesterday I had to identify cupcakes for bitcoin exchange Bitstamp, and today I get the following from Amazon:

I was already logged in to my Amazon account.  I went to buy something, and suddenly I was not logged in after all, I had to type my password.  After putting in all the work to find the various punctuation characters on the android keyboard, my next task was: type in my password again.  This wasn't some sort of glitch, it explicitly said I had to type it "again".  I was faster the second time, knowing where the tilde lived.  Next, they forced me to solve a captcha, screaming "we are incompetent at authentication and have zero respect for our customers".  Next, they sent an SMS to a mobile number.  Luckily, I had the mobile on me, or I would have had to abort the purchase.  Luckily, the mobile had a web browser and internet connection, because it wasn't a one-time code to transcribe, but a link to open.  Again, if either of these hadn't held, I would have had to abort the purchase.  Amazon must have known I'm trying to learn German, because the web page thus yielded was in German, despite my account settings and browser headers (see article "language customisation on web sites is always done badly and wrongly" [0]).  It was along the lines of "someone, maybe you, who knows your password, is trying to log in!!!".


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[0] <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2022/10/language-customisation-on-web-sites-is.html>

I sort of have some sympathy for Amazon here, or at least for the mediocre managers responsible.  Customer after customer will use the service with a hacked computer, or computer they otherwise do not control.  This will lead to all kinds of crap that Amazon has to deal with, one way or another.  The corporate managers who have to do something about this will come up with this and that, whatever comes into their head first, like make them type in their password a couple more times, make them solve a captcha, send them an SMS, write to them in German if they speak English but they're in a train going thru Germany (er?), and so on.  Some of this might even "help" in some kind of statistical sense, ignoring customers who ultimately will jump ship as soon as there's something better.  None of it moves us closer to the basic acceptable state for a world in which things can happen online, which is an infrastructure that supports (mutual) authentication conveniently, reliably, and without all this time-wasting displacement cupcakes crap.  Viewed from there, today's Amazon odyssey is like being parachuted into retard-land, deep behind enemy lines.

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