Launchpad Paranoia

Last night I am looking for some help trying to figure out what's wrong with my new Linux installation, and I run into something called Launchpad, which is a clearing house for problems with Linux. Naturally, you have to log on. Do I have an account here? I dunno, maybe. I was fooling with Linux last year, or maybe the year before, or sometime, and I was using something similar. So did they migrate all the user's to this new thing? Who knows?

I take a couple of guesses at what my password probably is, but it's no go. Okay, click the I-forgot-my-password button. A message pops up saying they have sent me an email, that should arrive very soon. Or in a couple of hours. Maybe. If the stars are in alignment.

I check my mail. Nothing. I check my spam folder. Nothing. I turn around three times and check again. Still nothing. Fine. We'll just open a new account. That works fine. Once again a message pops up saying they have sent me an email. Hmmm. Well, what do you know? It came through instantly. I got registered and everything is cool.

Except that when I claimed to have lost my password, they claimed they were sending me a message, but they didn't. They out and out lied. Grrrr. Why would they do that? I enquired, and I got this response:

"Why would it be a good thing to allow everyone on the Internet to check and see if an arbitrary email address has a Launchpad account associated with it?"

Methinks their paranoia runs over. I mean how many people are even interested in Launchpad? And of those, how many have evil designs? And what could you possibly hope to gain by finding out that someone with some email address had an account there?

While we are picking on Launchpad, let me gripe about the password. I have a nice, handy-dandy password I use for all my trivial accounts, which is basically everything except my email and my bank. It has several letters and several digits and it's long enough to make most logon programs happy. But is Launchpad happy? No, they are not. They want more. Come on people, exercise a little restraint. Stu sent me this picture the other day. I think it is quite apt.

Entire Swiss Army Knife

Update December 2022 replaced missing picture.