An interesting - to me, but off-topic - side note to this. About 10 yrs ago while going thru a divorce, I filled out the forms at the courthouse to change my last name back to my maiden name. Obviously you need to use real info for this. The form asked for my parents’ names, including their middle names. Neither of my parents had middle names so I left those fields blank. This was back when all forms were done by hand, not on a computer, & turned in on paper, not electronically.
Weeks went by & the name change approval didn’t come thru. Called my attorney to ask her to check on it w/the court. Turns out that leaving the field blank was not accepted; you needed to write in NONE, but that was not shown in the directions; it was an assumption by the court system. So my application was tossed aside but there was no mechanism to let me know; had I not had my attorney follow up, I would have stayed in limbo.
Had to redo the form & write in NONE for the middle name. Think that’s why I remembered the TidBits (or somewhere else) advice to use None for the answer to security questions.
Something to keep in mind when typing answers such as NONE or n/a into web-forms is that a computer, as opposed to a human, probably will interpret the text input literally.
In other words, the computer will store the four character string “NONE” or the three character string “n/a” as an acceptable answer to the question.
Yeah, more off-topic stuff from me.
I was employed by a large federal agency. During one of its fits of security theater, I was required to provide an answer to a secret question. I typed “not your business” for the answer. My supervisor got a call from IT; the tech was complaining that I was not taking security seriously. On the contrary, I answered, I’m taking it so seriously that I’m not providing an easily-obtained bit of information about me. And, my answer is not likely to be guessed by the bad guys. And, speaking of security, how do you know what my answer was? Surely you’re not storing the secret answers in plain text, are you? The IT tried to deflect my questions, but my supervisor was having none of it, and took the IT guy to task for discussing my secret answer on an unsecured phone line. (That was nice. We didn’t have any secure phone lines, but it shut the IT guy up.)
It drives me nuts when a form designer assumes everyone in the world has the same starting point as he or she has. If the form designer or programmer wants something, he or she should say so. It especially annoyed me when I had a password rejected for having a special character. If there are restrictions, say so. Bah.
Thanks for letting me rant.