I'll preface this shortish missive by saying that I worked in the IT industry some 20-odd years ago... and very little of this actually surprises me!
So, anyway...
Allegedly, all this technology and code we use every day is "supposed to" make life easier and more convenient for us all. And — at least in some ways — I have to admit that it does.
Carefully balanced...
Technological Handshakes are a Small Miracle...
Although we tend to complain a lot, it's actually a small miracle that all the devices and software we use is actually able to shake hands and operate without everything turning into chaos.
Consider that a whole group of people create something they think is important, get it to install on a device created by a whole different group of people who thought something else was important, and then that somehow ends up communicating with a different device using different code — all created by different people — and somehow the whole thing still works!
Well, most of the time...
Water reflecting in the center of a flower, after rain...
Google Has Blocked Google, for Your Protection...
So I am working rather hard to simplify my life, these days.
That is currently including a major effort to get "far too many" email accounts to all talk to each other and deposit all the collective email of multiple business and personal accounts into one single location... ostensibly in the hope that I will no longer miss important messages because they get filtered to the wrong place, or are in an account I didn't happen to check, on a particular day.
Not as simple as it looks!
Or maybe it doesn't even "look simple..."
So I am trying to set this up with my primary gmail (a Google product) which means that email (a Google product) has to access a different gmail account (a Google product) to retrieve the messages.
I figured those would be the easiest to set up.
Fall leaves...
An "Unknown App..."... WHAT???
To give Google credit, there's a pretty straightforward interface to get different gmail accounts to talk to each other...
What turned out to be "not so good" was the fact that I kept getting an "access denied" message back from one of the accounts. Had I typed in the password incorrectly?
So I manually logged back into the gmail (a Google product) account in question and found a "security flag" message that read:
"Google blocked an unknown app from trying to access this gmail account. As a security precaution, you should change your password immediately!"
.
WTF, mate?
I don't know what it "means" on the greater scale of things, but Google is basically blocking itself, for security purposes...
Now I need to go find something that will remove the keyboard imprint from my forehead...
Hope your day is going better than mine!
(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post)
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Created at 191008 13:25 PDT
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