A long-overdue linkpost to my own posts

[jayeless]

Hello! Remember how I said I was going to try linking to my micro.blog posts over here? Well I still intend to, but obviously it's not something I'm really great at. Anyway, since it's been so long (nearly a month 😬) I'm just going to link a few of the selected highlights. Feel free to go to my micro.blog's homepage and browse through all the posts if you want to see everything (including cat photos, some links to interesting articles/games/apps, some linguistics musings, some book reviews, you know the drill).

• Dec 12 - a titleless post about changing email addresses: I've been moving away from Gmail and Outlook to ProtonMail, for the better privacy implications, and I wrote a quick post about some of my experiences actually changing email addresses (some sites have better ways of dealing with this than others, and there are even some – like Spotify – that I don't think let me change at all)
• Dec 15 - Perfection isn't necessary, just try your best: a post about how in most circumstances you don't need to be perfect (with a new diet, fitness routine, moving away from privacy-violating online services, etc.) to experience the benefits
• Dec 24 - Upgrading my iPhone: a post about how long I'd had the old one (3½ years), what I was doing with it now I was no longer going to be using it (giving it to my sister, who was soldiering on with a barely-functional Galaxy S4), and what new phone I got (iPhone 12 Mini)
• Dec 29 - Thoughts on gender and (my) pronouns: some reflections on why I felt uncomfortable specifying pronouns on things like my Mastodon profile (my reasons are complicated so I'm not going to summarise them in a one-liner, please read the post if you want to know)
• Dec 31 - Reflecting on 2020: the obligatory end-of-year post talking about my experience of the pandemic, relatives' deaths and near-deaths, etc. (it was mostly not a happy year for me)
• Jan 7 - Stray thoughts on the storming of the US Capitol: mostly thoughts on US imperialism, the rise of the far-right globally
• Jan 8 - Experimenting with Gemini: if you haven't heard of Gemini, it's a super lightweight alternative to HTTPS optimised for text posts. I think it's a cool concept, and I'm hoping it becomes easier for non-ultra-technical people to participate in Gemini space

As per usual feel free to comment here if you find anything you'd like to make a comment on!

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

One of the banks I use sends me physical paper letters in the mail every time I change a setting with them. If I change three settings, I get three letters about it like a week or two later, each as a one-line sentence on its own sheet of paper in its own envelope and its own 40-something cent stamp. And I simply cannot for the life of me be bothered to figure out where the paperless toggle is in my account, but I am baffled at how much of a money sink that kind of a system must be, not to mention how little it would really do to receive notice that your account's been changed a good week after the fact.

[jayeless]

Ouch, that is absurd. I feel like banks/financial entities are some of the least up-to-speed with modern technology, security practices, and intelligible UI… the only websites that are even worse than theirs are government ones. How do such critical institutions not think it important to have modern, secure websites? I can only assume they just don't want to pay the salaries of developers who actually know what they're doing 😐

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I agree, I use four banks and their client portals are either super outdated or super sleek-looking but lacking basic functionality.

My partner works tech at a bank, though, and he says that banks can't be cutting edge because every time new tech comes out, it needs to be thoroughly vetted for security vulnerabilities and bugs and such, which I suppose makes sense.

Doesn't explain how buggy, inaccessible, or unmodern they can be, though.

Excellent points!

[jesse_the_k]

My home town is big on credit unions. There are almost a dozen member-owned, not-for-profit financial institutions. The North American and international membership associations, as well as the insurance company founded by those groups are here.

Our public university was an early internet hub; our CS department was founded in 1964.

Yet only one of those credit unions has a decent web presence

https://www.uwcu.org

We stopped doing business with others because their privacy protections were so weak* and their sites so confusing.

* We tried to open an account at one and the person helping us had a list of passwords in the left-hand drawer.

Re: Excellent points!

[jayeless]

I can totally understand why you'd make that choice. One that really annoys me is the MyGov website we have in Australia, that you have to use if you need to interact with the government online (e.g. paying taxes, getting Medicare rebates, receiving Centrelink payments). It is absolutely terrible – passwords are limited to a max of eight characters, there are compulsory security questions, and it doesn't even let you change your email address – the official advice is to make a new account with the new email address and just stop using the first account 🤯