Fuck, bugger, wank and a multiple more expletives yelled in frustration, annoyance, anger – yes, resorting to using fuck shows a limited vocabulary on my part – but it’s a wonderful word to get your tongue around, to scream, shout – fill with noise and vent emotionally – when you need it. And why this torrent of anger? Because some unmentionable stole my Yahoo account. I’d been chatting and camming with a girl for a few months just about travel and photography. Earlier this week she typed she had some photos of her recent holiday, and she gave me a Geocities address (which I typed into my browser, no clicking on links in emails or chat messages for me). Up pops a Yahoo photo webpage – identical to the Yahoo photo album page (Geocities is owned by Yahoo) I’d used to post some travel photos a few weeks earlier. Yahoo is always asking me to re-enter my password to move between different sections of its various sites (‘For your safety,’ it always claims), so I enter my password and seconds later I get a little box pop up on my screen saying “You have been signed out as you are logged on at another computer” – or words to that effect. And bang, my Yahoo messenger account was gone – together with about 200 friends’ contact details. Oh, but wait, Yahoo is this big internet portal. So ‘Poof’ my email account with several hundred contacts plus my complete email history for the past few years is gone. ‘Poof’ my Yahoo groups account is gone, ‘Poof’ my Yahoo photos are gone, and ‘Poof’ again my flickr account with all its photos is gone – thanks to Yahoo insisting a few months ago that I couldn’t use my flickr id to log in, I had to use my Yahoo id as they’d spent millions/ billions to buy flickr. All the sites I had registered with, who’d then sent confirmation emails with my log-in id and password gone, usurped. So within like a second my complete internet social life, photo storage… gone! Do Yahoo give a fuck, NO! I filed a complaint via their complaints page about the account seizure, and got the cookie cutter response that they couldn’t do anything about it. I sent them copies of the emails from another account I’d used to verify the account when it was set up. No, fuck off, was essence of the politely worded response it’s not our problem. I asked, them can’t you suspend the account while you sort this out? No! Although they were quick enough to take down the fake photo log-in page hosted on their Geocities site.

Now there is someone out there who is obviously dishonest and has access to all my friends contacts, who - when contacted - will think it’s me. And this person can access any of the websites I registered with over the last few years… Well fucked am I – and do Yahoo care? Not one iota – not about me and not about all my friends who are now at risk. There are two caveats to this mess: one, thankfully because it was my social log-in id – not all my personal details are correct and hopefully it will be hard for the usurper to access any financial records. Second, do you know how hard it is to prove you are you? You get an email from an email address you don’t recognize that says, “Hi this is me, I’m not on that old email address. Someone stole it, but this is really me…” Right! So now I am me, but I am not me while at the same time I am a new me. But the real me is not and, from now until the end of time, will never again be on Yahoo.

sd