[PLUG-TALK] Big companies, incompetent web sites

[Rich Shepard]

   Keith shared his facebook frustrations with us earlier today, and that
company's issues have been in the news lately. I think there's a more
serious concern with large companies who hold our personal data and have
poorly implemented web sites.

   HealthNet is my medical insurance company. I keep trying to use their web
site to find local optomotrists, but the page won't load all the data.
Instead, it keeps reloading with the text entry widget flickering. When I
close the browser tab there are many dozen bookmarks for that page that I
need to delete. So, this afternoon I called their customer support line.

   The fellow at their end also had problems getting that web page to load,
but finally did so. I asked him to print the page send me the .pdf. Instead,
he sent an e-mail with a 532-character URL. They, like other companies,
assume everyone uses a GUI mail user agent and can click on the URL and have
that page load. Doesn't work that way with alpine or mutt. So, I removed the
spaces and entered that huge URL in the firefox address line. The result?

"Due to the presence of characters known to be used in Cross Site Scripting
attacks, access is forbidden. This web site does not allow Urls which might
include embedded HTML tags."

   And we're supposed to trust insurance companies with personal data when
they reject a URL sent by their own web server? If you want to try this
yourself, ask me off the mail list and I'll send you that long URL.

   So much for customer service, eh?

Rich