ttj - Tom Jones

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 auth...

As a person moves around the world, they encounter local languages where they go.  That is obvious.  Should a person's personal computing devices also switch to the local language?  Should their smartphone menus be in French when in France, German when in Germany, and Japanese when in Japan?  What about web sites? Someone engaging in full immersion to learn a language might choose to do that.  Everyone else expects to be able to move around, and for their own computers to continue to talk to them in their language. Web sites are especially bad at this.  They use geo-ip, make assumptions about the language based on the country, and present stuff in that language.  This extremely stupid technique might have been acceptable were there no other ways to determine the user's language. HTTP has a header Accept - Language for this purpose.  And every request from major browsers tends to contain it.  That should be used with precedence over geo-ip....

 I started by searching "fly innsbruck london" on google.  Austrian Airlines had bought an ad.  I clicked on the ad.  It returned a simple error page "You don't have permission to access this resource on the server". I went back and selected a different link under austrian.com.  I filled in the flight details.  There were several form glitches, for example only the digits "20" of the year in the date were visible. On form submission, I got a page with title "Challenge Validation" and "We are processing your request".  It never progressed.  Nothing happened. Instead, I went to skyscanner, and then easyjet.  Easyjet had failed to sell me tickets last time [0].   How will they do this time? [0] < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/easyjet-fails.html > Again using my old account (which used to work fine 15 years ago), they again forced a password reset, again switching workflow from web site to email to do this (very bad). I ...