I recently tried to set up a new account on Verizon’s web site.  In order to do this, you have to choose a login and a password.  Reasonable enough.  The page says that the password must be “Minimum 6 characters with at least 1 number”.  I run my password generating script (dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=6 | uuencode -) and get VB3:Q-0".  Seems reasonable, so I enter it.  No.  “The password should contain one number, only three repeating characters, no spaces or email addresses and no other special characters.  Please try again.” Grrr.  So I run the program a few more times, get a password that’s just numbers and letters, randomize its case, and enter it.

And go on to create my account?  No.  Verizon’s is also one of the many websites that refuses to acknowledge the validity of the plus sign in an email address.  When submitting my email to a site, I usually use , just to track usage of that address.  Many stupid sites don’t like that.  Bah.  And the page was SSL, so I couldn’t easily mess with the parameters to see if they put their trust in client-side validity checks.

Now, of course, I’ve attempted to log in and the page is sitting at a “please wait” box.  Probably only works with IE anyway.  I’ll have to go through the site and try to find a contact email address to yell at.

Verizon sucks.  (Like everyone doesn’t already know that.)