I have 3 broadband networks at home. I use BSNL 900+UL, Asianet WOW 199 and Reliance Netconnect. My main network is BSNL which is quite stable at 256kbps. Asianet is the backup which gives speeds upto 2MBPS. Reliance netconnect using USB modem is the final backup and I use it whenever I am on train or bus or on the beach thinking about hot babes like maria sharapova (don’t worry, it is a gimmick to get more traffic!).

As I have posted earlier, I recently upgraded IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. Also Firefox was upgraded to 2.0.0.3. Everything looked smooth until today.

Today being the last day of the month, I wanted to check the Asianet WOW 199 usage. The maximum I can use is 700MB/month and I just wanted to see what is left and download something (paris hilton photos perhaps?)

So I switched my Wifi connection to Asianet and clicked on the account usage link. The login screen came and I typed in user/password and clicked go. Following is the screen I got on IE 7.0.

As you can see the error is quite informative. It is as useful as a britney spears album is to a seminary (oops I did it again, the traffic bait!).

The error looked suspicious since login page and account page were served from the same server. Anyway I called up customer care and they sweared that the server is infact working!

Ok, probably IE 7.0 has some bug. So I tried the Firefox 2.0 to login, and here is what I got,

Thank god! Atleast it says there is something wrong with SSL! This error is much more useful than the IE 7.0 error. But still I have no clue what is happening. The idiots who coded this error decided that I don’t want to know how to access the site.

But I want to. Otherwise I have no other way of getting my account info. So turned to the ultimate saviour of tech problems. The Google!

Ok. Here is the true picture. IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.0 decided to support only SSL version 3.0 onwards since previous versions of SSL (1.0 and 2.0) are insecure. But luckily in IE 7.0 there is an easy way to enable SSL 2.0 (which Asianet account page is using).

1. Click on Internet Options -> Advanced.

2. Under security, check the use SSL 2.0 checkbox.

The firefox 2.0 hack to enable SSL 2.0 is bit complicated. If you are itching to know about it, search in Google!

Now this incident clearly demonstrates why many Software developers are idiots when it comes to usability. Be it microsoft or the open source community, there are many who fail to understand simple user interface/communication principles.

I guess this also explains why geeks are incapable of getting girl friends like aishwarya rai!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Opinion, Personal, Programming, Software. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.