Not a VIP?
VIPs get access to posts of a more personal nature, which I have restricted from the general public. Let me be perfectly clear: it's restricted for a reason - it's really not anything anybody wants to read. Including myself, and I wrote the damn stuff. In all seriousness, it's really quite depressing at times. Stuff I write when I get lonely and angsty. It's there as a venue for me to vent things that I don't like to talk about, in a controlled environment. Call it therapy for free, only nobody's listening.
As of Tue Oct 07, 2008 10:58:56 AM there are 22 hidden blog posts, each marked with one or more of the 4 restricted tags.
Okay, how do I become a VIP?
Ask me. If we're close enough that I feel comfortable giving you access to the restricted posts, then I'll add you to the list. If you don't know how to contact me, then we're not close enough.
What's up with the goofy name "VIP"? This isn't a club, you know!
Indeed. Basically, it was the best analogy I could come up with for a passwordless access control system. I wanted to use a term normal people would understand. You know, instead of a phrase like "passwordless access control system".
Yeah, speaking of passwords, why don't you ask for one?
Basically, in this situation, they're unecessary and even a little dangerous.
Passwords are hard to remember, and really more of a comfort than real security measure. Most normal human beings do not pick passwords which are difficult for a computer to guess (see: easily found studies that cite the most common password as "password"). Chances are, unless your password is several characters long; contains letters, numbers, and special characaters; and has no basis on any word in the english language, it wouldn't be hard for a determined individual to break it. Sadly, normal people cannot remember and thus do not use those kinds of passwords.
Furthermore, there are many sites on the internet today which ask for passwords but do not really need one. For example, registering with those stupid newspaper websities. Good passwords are hard enough to remember; it's not helping the case that people today are asked to remember ten or twenty of them.
Which leads into the next point: most people re-use the same passwords for many different sites. Unfortunately, my site is really not very secure, mostly because I don't feel like forking over the cash for an SSL certificate. So, that means, if you were to re-use a password on my website, there's a chance a Bad Person could get ahold of it and gain access to one of your accounts which are actually important.
Finally, I don't really care all that much if a Bad Person reads some of my more personal blogs. There are worse things in life, and it's not like I'm posting my credit card number or SSN.