Dick Pountain/Idealog 249/09 April 2015 21:04
Recently the medical profession has discovered that stimulating our brains with difficult puzzles and problems - mental exercise in other words - has a beneficial effect on health.Such exercises can't, as some have suggested, actually cure dementia but there's evidence it may delay its onset. Just a few years ago one of the big electronic vendors advertised its hand-held games console by showing ecstatic grey-beards using it to play Connect Four on the sofa with their grandsprogs. As a senior citizen myself I must feign interest in such matters, but in truth I've never really worried that I'm not getting enough mental exercise, because the sheer cack-handedness that prevails in the IT business supplies all the exercise I can use, for free, every single month.
Take for example the impact of new security measures on the attempt to keep a working website. Plagued by hacks, leaks, LulzSec, Heartbleed, NSA surveillance, every online vendor is tightening security, but they're not all that good at notifying you how. I've had a personal website since 1998, and more recently I've also been running three blogs while maintaining an archive of the works of a dear friend who died a couple of years ago. I've never believed in spending too much money on these ventures, so I hosted my very first attempt at a website on Geocities, and built it using a free copy of NetObjects Fusion from a PC Pro cover disk. Mine was thus one of the 38,000,000 sites orphaned when Yahoo closed Geocities in 2009, so I moved to Google Sites and built a new one from scratch using Google's online tools. Around this time I also shelled out money to buy my own domain name dickpountain.co.uk from the US-based registrar Freeparking.
My low budget set-up has worked perfectly satisfactorily, without hiccup, for the last six years, that is until January of this year when I suddenly found that www.dickpountain.co.uk no longer accessed my site. To be more exact, it said it had accessed it but no pages actually appeared. I checked that the site was working via its direct Google Sites address of https://sites.google.com/site/dickpountainspages/ and it was, so perhaps redirection from my domain had stopped working properly? To check that, I went to log into my account at Freeparking's UK site, only to find that entering my credentials merely evoked the message "A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol. Error code: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH?"
Locked out of my account I couldn't reach Freeparking support, so I mailed RWC columnist Paul Ockenden who immediately asked whether I was using Chrome. Yes I was. Did I know that nowadays it disables SSL3 by default? No I didn't, thank you Paul. With SSL3 enabled I managed to get into my account, only to find nothing had changed: it was still set to redirect dickpountain.co.uk to that Google address. About then I received another email from Paul saying a source view on http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/ shows the frameset there but not visible: Google was suddenly refusing to display pages in an external frameset, problem not with Freeparking.
An evening plodding through the forums revealed that Google too has upped security, and now you have to verify ownership of your site (even one that's been running for six years already). Their help page explaining verification offers four different methods: add a meta tag to your home page to prove you have access to the source files; add the Google Analytics code you use to track your site; upload an HTML file to your server; or verify via your domain name provider by adding a new DNS record. None of the first three worked because my site was built in Google's own tools, which strip out any added meta tags and won't allow uploading raw HTML. I needed to make a trek into into the belly of the beast, into Mordor, into... DNS. Now DNS scares me the way the phone company scared Lenny Bruce ("mess with it and you'll wind up using two dixie cups and a string"). Log into Freeparking site, go to ominously-named "Original DNS Manager Interface (advanced users)" and edit a CNAME record to point, as instructed by Google Help to ghs.google.com. Nothing happens. Try again, five times, before it finally sticks. Half an hour later www.dickpountain.co.uk works again!
You might expect me to be annoyed by such a nerve-wracking and unnecessary experience, but you must be kidding, I was jubilant. I still have it! The buggers didn't grind me down! It's like climbing Everest while checkmating Kasparov! Macho computing, bring it on, mental whoops and high-fives. It did wear off after a couple of days, but I still smirk a little every time I log onto my site now...
