Saturday Superstar: Authenticators

Alternate title: Don't look so smug.

I use firefox. And noscript. And antivirus software. It watches for other baddies as well. I don't download random crap. I watch what sites I go to. I've never bought gold, never used a leveling service, never shared my account info.

I'm safe, right? Well, I've never been hacked.

I got an authenticator anyway. And here's where the smugness comes in.

On one side there are the authenticator elitists. They say you deserve to get hacked if you don't have one. You're stupid. You're a moron. You're cheap and lazy and undeserving to even play WoW.

I'd be one of these, except that I am given some modesty by recognition of my privileged situation. I never bought an authenticator. Never spent a dime on it. Never had to wait for shipping. I got an iPod Touch for graduation and got the mobile authenticator. Free and instant.

In a sense I inherited the authenticator. So for me to say that those without authenticators are stupid and lazy is pretty stupid and lazy. For five years I did not have one; they weren't always available, but you get the point. It was not my own intelligence and initiative that caused me to have an authenticator.

I suspect many people are like this. They never had to really choose to have an authenticator because it's a simple app to get. It's the worst sort of elitism: the undeserved sort; a rich son insulting the commoners when he has shown no more initiative than any of them.

On the other side, there are the smug "I've never been hacked crowd". Good for you. But just by the odds, you're not likely to get hacked. You have to get a keylogger, which is much harder than the forums would make you think; it's not as if the first website you click will hijack your computer. Whoever gets that information has to know what to do with it: remember that people are mostly after credit card info, not WoW accounts. Mere luck is protecting a lot of people; not their brilliant internet security skills.

The worst though are the ones who are vehemently against Blizzard adding $5 to the next expansion and making them mandatory. Well, okay there are arguments about the inconvenience, those aren't the ones I mean. Instead I mean the "why should I pay $5 because other people are stupid?" crowd. These are the true idiots. They're so wrapped up in their own selfishness that they cannot see that the $5 cycles back to them in the form of shorter GM queues, lower costs of Blizzard which mean more money to make awesome stuff for us, and greater overall security which means less spam, and a better economy.

Maybe people are just stupid to not have authenticators yet. So what? I'll trade $5 and my moral outrage for a better game experience.

Both sides are being arrogant and attributing entirely to their own actions what is mostly luck and circumstance.