Password posers, prime ministerial problems and the pernicious right
YOU know that feeling when you’ve written down all your usernames and passwords in some sort of code and haven’t needed to log in for a while and spent hours decoding your own scribblings?
Well, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days, despite using a decent password manager. But I hadn’t used it for so long that I forgot the app’s password and I couldn’t transcribe it from any of my scribblings.
The waters have been muddied to a significant extent with biometrics – facial and fingerprint recognition are (I think) a great idea, but they do tend to make me lazy.
Every so often they’ll ask you to insert your password before letting you into a site or program and, if you’re not a regular user you can find yourself stumped.
I’ve been doing a bit of travelling since last year and only took my phone with me. That was all hunky dory until the biometrics stopped working and websites and mail accounts started asking me to insert my passwords.
Cue something just short of panic as I was locked out of various accounts before being prompted to change all their passwords. That done I was back in the wired world, but for the past few months I’ve been through a similar process with all the accounts I didn’t use with the iPhone.
I think they’ve all been sorted now – until the next travel time.
Aside from my password posers, something that I find more worrying is the rise of the pernicious right in our domestic politics. Initially I saw this as an English phenomenon, but the Scottish elections disabused me of that notion, along with the baying mob that previously mounted a demonstration outside a hotel in Falkirk housing some asylum seekers.
I never thought we’d witness the spectacle of Farage’s mob of shaven-headed, knuckle dragging goons taking their place in Holyrood.
It’s also worrying to see right-wing violence spreading across these isles with minorities the victims of the thugs.
What about Andy Burnham though – from Greater Manchester to Downing Street?
Let’s face it, almost anyone would be more effective as PM than the hapless Keir Starmer.
I’ve rarely witnessed someone so very publicly out of his depth as Starmer, who doesn’t/can’t answer the simplest of questions without a blank look as his brain cells go into overdrive.
By contrast, I’ve been watching Burnham in interviews and on panel shows and he is a very credible operator.
Even people in Makerfield who are not his natural supporters appear united in the view that he will win the seat.
I wonder how long Starmer will last in No 10 after next week’s poll?
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