Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

[Dessi]

Just sayin'. You know, in case you hadn't heard...

https://www.healthcare.gov/

I'm trying to create a marketplace account, place account. Who was the idiot who came up with this screen?

Sorry Héctor, René, Aimée, Mr. Patiño, Ms. Alère, Dr. Schäfer, your names are too good for Obamacare. Real 'Muricans don't have names with squigglies and dots and crazy punctuation all over their names.

Suck it up, and Anglicanize your name, proceed to the next page...

Why does my username need minimum complexity requirements? Why can't I use anything I want? Oh well, email address works great: myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com

This is definitely "6-74 characters long" and contains "a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symboles _.@/-".

WRONG! This username is invalid. But no reason is given. The hell?

Ok, moving on: passwords. I use a tool to generate my passwords, so I try a few:

Attempt 1: #2[3O5/gY.VY@:1F[>Ls
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 2: U1/h+'7"2="Gn<]; 2[<
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 3: ur20#3d1498v#:fucG8_
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 4: ';i=[f2B]%-R=r]bB_Z>
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 5: '-2(H@|b-x5vf<["..eO
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 6: G3ntly d0wn th3 str3am!
PASSWORD TOO LONG! What idiot decided to put a max length on passwords? Seriously, credible purpose does this serve?

Attempt 7: Is this a joke?
INVALID PASSWORD!

Attempt 7: Password123!
SUCCESS!

Thanks for nothing, Obamacare.

 

[MattusMaximus]

I'm a believer. Bless the analysts.

Translation: I'm too lazy to do that much work. It's easier to merely assert my beliefs as evidence.

 

[MattusMaximus]

I'm trying to create a marketplace account, place account. Who was the idiot who came up with this screen?...

... Thanks for nothing, Obamacare.

Your password complaint is hilarious. You fail to follow the instructions by using a random password generator which inputs the very characters they say "don't input" and then you get mad at them because you didn't follow the instructions?

Like I said, hilarious.

 

[Biscuit]

I thought it didn't take effect until January.

It'll be January by the time that page loads! Bunch free loading liberal hippies over loading the ACA and it's only day 1!!!

 

[MattusMaximus]

It'll be January by the time that page loads! Bunch free loading liberal hippies over loading the ACA and it's only day 1!!!

Yup, it's clear that people don't want Obamacare

 

[TimCallahan]

The muslim from Kenya has succeeded in ruining this once great nation.

You forgot to mention that, along with being a Muslim he's an atheist (you'll find that tidbit at about 4minutes and 40 second into this bizarre video.

 

[Donal]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...own_and_obamacare_poetic_justice_for_gop.html



And the longer they fight against it, the more and more stupid they'll look. Especially after more and more people sign up for it.

You can't fix stupid.

Christie came more into power because out of control cronyism spending, high taxes, and crooked governor in NJ by the name of Jim Corzine. He does tow the official party line the majority of the time, but he's no Tea Party darling. He's compromised with NJ Democrats plenty of times (while still talking heaping amounts of trash).

 

[Biscuit]

Yup, it's clear that people don't want Obamacare

Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait
We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we're working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience!

I think this is what they meant by death panels.

 

[Tony]

Your password complaint is hilarious. You fail to follow the instructions by using a random password generator which inputs the very characters they say "don't input" and then you get mad at them because you didn't follow the instructions?

Like I said, hilarious.

I followed the instructions and was still unable to process my application. My only hope is that now that I HAVE put some information into the system, the system won't erroneously think I already have an account and reject my new application when it does become fully operational.

Has there been any announcement about when the website issues will be addressed?

 

[Polaris]

Christie came more into power because out of control cronyism spending, high taxes, and crooked governor in NJ by the name of Jim Corzine. He does tow the official party line the majority of the time, but he's no Tea Party darling. He's compromised with NJ Democrats plenty of times (while still talking heaping amounts of trash).

As he did today by taking the initiative to appeal his own state's lower court decision to legalize gay marriage.

Christie isn't a good guy, he just sucks less than most in his party.

 

[Donal]

Your password complaint is hilarious. You fail to follow the instructions by using a random password generator which inputs the very characters they say "don't input" and then you get mad at them because you didn't follow the instructions?

Like I said, hilarious.

Still crappy security policy

 

[Kestrel]

I'm trying to create a marketplace account, place account. Who was the idiot who came up with this screen?

[qimg]http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/2466/3j9k.png[/qimg]

Sorry Héctor, René, Aimée, Mr. Patiño, Ms. Alère, Dr. Schäfer, your names are too good for Obamacare. Real 'Muricans don't have names with squigglies and dots and crazy punctuation all over their names.

My middle name has an accent. I learned a long time ago to leave it off when using computer forms. Even in the advent of UNICODE based web applications, the data is likely to be converted to EBCDIC and passed through the bowels of a Jurassic Era COBAL application at some point.

Colorado's exchange also doesn't like special characters in passwords. I sent them a suggestion that they warn users about this restriction.

It could be worse. I have run into systems that allowed you to choose a password with a special character, but didn't allow it to be entered when logging in.

 

[MattusMaximus]

I think this is what they meant by death panels.

LOL

 

[Donal]

As he did today by taking the initiative to appeal his own state's lower court decision to legalize gay marriage.

Christie isn't a good guy, he just sucks less than most in his line of work.

FTFY

 

[Polaris]

FTFY

Thanks for keeping me honest.

 

[MattusMaximus]

My middle name has an accent. I learned a long time ago to leave it off when using computer forms. Even in the advent of UNICODE based web applications, the data is likely to be converted to EBCDIC and passed through the bowels of a Jurassic Era COBAL application at some point.

Colorado's exchange also doesn't like special characters in passwords. I sent them a suggestion that they warn users about this restriction.

It could be worse. I have run into systems that allowed you to choose a password with a special character, but didn't allow it to be entered when logging in.

I'm sure there are going to be glitches; I'd be surprised if there weren't glitches in something this big. But you just have to work through it, as people will inevitably do.

 

[Donal]

Thanks for keeping me honest.

Too be fair (or at least more accurate) Christie has said he's not going to sign off on a law about gay marriage until there is a Constitutional amendment.

Granted that will never happen, but at least he stays consistent.

 

[Alferd_Packer]

I beg to differ. I'll be looking into this, when I get the chance, to see if it is a viable replacement for employer based health insurance, which allow me to be more selective in the kinds of jobs I accept. This is potentially a fairly big deal for me.

I read an article the other day about a couple that wanted to start up their own business, but were reluctant to give up their employer based coverage. The were looking at the ACA as a possible alternative.

 

[Dessi]

Your password complaint is hilarious. You fail to follow the instructions by using a random password generator which inputs the very characters they say "don't input" and then you get mad at them because you didn't follow the instructions?

Like I said, hilarious.

Explaining the joke and therefore killing all humor in 3..2..1..

The password policies on that site are terrible. Absolutely terrible because:

1) passwords with maximum lengths are always unacceptable.

This restriction exists because the developer is probably encrypting passwords rather than hashing them. Encrypted text is proportional to the size of the plaintext input, hashed text has a fixed length regardless of the size of the input.

Encypting is less optimal than hashing, but perhaps encryption was chosen to allow users to recover their plaintext passwords for some reason?

Still, let's assume password length restriction was unavoidable: couldn't the developer have made the password field in the database larger to accommodate longer passwords, up to 255 chars for example? The 20 char limit is tiny, encourages short passwords and makes more secure passphrases all but impossible.

2) there's no rational basis for restricting password entry to specific characters. None. Users should be able to use whatever chars they want.

Encrypted or hashed passwords result in an array of random bytes. Developers usually hex-encode or base64-encode the resulting bytes, which in turn maps the bytes back to the ASCII character space, so the encoded password can be stored in a database without any fancy Unicode collation.

If the web server or programming language used to run the site has poor support for unicode characters, the developer can hex/base64-encode the password on the client before sending the data to the server.

To you, as a user, that means your passwords have reduced entropy, makes it hard to substitute letters with special characters, encourages weaker passwords.

tl;dr version: crappy password policies encourage users to create crappy passwords. Weak passwords that are hard for humans to remember, yet easy for computers to crack. FAIL.

 

[Biscuit]

I read an article the other day about a couple that wanted to start up their own business, but were reluctant to give up their employer based coverage. The were looking at the ACA as a possible alternative.

I believe it's the number one reason why people don't start their own businesses. My pre-existing condition nearly stopped me as well but then I said F it I am doing this.