{"id":103,"date":"2009-07-12T21:21:59","date_gmt":"2009-07-13T02:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/?p=103"},"modified":"2009-11-21T20:32:58","modified_gmt":"2009-11-22T02:32:58","slug":"microsoft-closes-hotmail-account","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Closes Hotmail Account"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a Hotmail account for years, and today I went to sign into it to retrieve and old e-mail address and was met with:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90304-PM.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-104\" title=\"Hotmail Account Closed\" src=\"http:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90304-PM-300x204.jpg\" alt=\"Hotmail Account Closed\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\" srcset=\"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90304-PM-300x204.jpg 300w, https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90304-PM.jpg 718w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Which is interesting in an of itself, you would think that rather than having a link to ANOTHER form, they would have just put the form at the bottom of the page, or better yet have a challenge or a captcha (that&#8217;s better than the obviously insufficient one that let the spammers create the account in the first place) to let me reinstate my account after proving I&#8217;m a human.\u00a0 So instead they send me off to yet another page:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90318-PM.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-105\" title=\"Another Account Closed Message\" src=\"http:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90318-PM-300x250.jpg\" alt=\"Another Account Closed Message\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" srcset=\"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90318-PM-300x250.jpg 300w, https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/Fullscreen-capture-7122009-90318-PM.jpg 967w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hmm, interesting, the same as the first page, except now they let me know that I probably didn&#8217;t violate their TOS (actually I&#8217;m sure I have doing something, not that they&#8217;re actually noticed).\u00a0 Additionally, there isn&#8217;t a form to fill out here, in fact there&#8217;s barely even a contact e-mail at the bottom of the page &#8211; <strong>but alas, I can&#8217;t use my e-mail account!!! <\/strong> Somebody fails here, as <em>they&#8217;ve suspended my e-mail account<\/em>.\u00a0 So now what I would have to do is <strong>sign up for e-mail with somebody else!<\/strong> Great move, drive customers to OTHER service providers so they can send you an e-mail begging for their account back.<\/p>\n<p>I was eventually able to figure out that my account had been sending spam messages, so either the password was too weak and dictionary attack got it, I logged into this account through a bad access point and someone pulled it from the traffic, or I was on a computer with a keylogger\/malware that pulled it.\u00a0 I rarely use the account except for MSN\/Live Mesh, when I log into Hotmail I go directly to the page from a browser so I really doubt I got hit by someone phishing with a fake site.<\/p>\n<p>Moral of the story: use strong passwords and change them often, other moral is if you&#8217;re designing a web interface make sure you have a logical system set up for your users, in this case likely there are many programmers at M-soft and somebody never checked the links.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a Hotmail account for years, and today I went to sign into it to retrieve and old e-mail address and was met with: Which is interesting in an of itself, you would think that rather than having a link to ANOTHER form, they would have just put the form at the bottom of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[39,40],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-webdevelopment","tag-microsoft","tag-programming-fail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrismeyer.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}