My coworker Dylan (he of Epicenter fame) logged in to Aetna’s website today to peruse some details of his corporate health care plan. While he was there, he decided to change his account’s password.

Dylan filled out a standard "change password" dialog by entering his old and new passwords. Then, rather than returning a "password successfully changed" message of some sort, the Aetna site spit out the error shown above — complete with Dylan’s old and new passwords in the URL.

He tried again and successfully changed his password, and was greeted by this screen when he tried to log in with his new password (shot after the jump):

Continue Reading “Aetna’s Website Displays User Password in the URL” »

Artist Linzie Hunter has come up with a brilliant concept — she takes the subject lines of spam e-mails, dolls them up with interesting type and colors, then repurposes them as works of art. You can view some of the creations she’s posted to Flickr. In the comments, Linzie notes that she plans to reproduce the pieces as larger postcards and full-size prints.

This is the latest in a line of genius "spam imitates art" projects, and definitely one of our favorites right behind the Brother’s McLeod’s Spamland series of animated shorts. Each Spamland script is culled directly from the contents of real e-mail spam. When the words are pulled out of their original context and placed into a new form, like with Linzie’s prints, the result is a series of gibberish-speak, bizarre non-sequitors and unintentional humor.

Big ups to Derek Powazek. Image via Flickr.

Here’s a find which comes our way from the Reddit folks — a Rube Goldberg machine let loose on a web storefront. Turn off your Flash blocker and turn on your speakers to experience this bit of genius from the Netherlands-based Hema.

It’s like your browser is high on some powerful drugs.

The idea of letting readers leave comments was something like a bad case of lice, once comments showed up on that first site, forget it, the whole web was infected. Nearly everywhere you go on the web there’s some way to immortalize your inane banter, er, I mean thoughts, for everyone to see.

But what about when you can’t be bothered to read the stuff you’re commenting on? And what if you just don’t have any thoughts? Let someone else do the thinking. It’s part of the whole “outsourcing your brain” idea that “life hacking” sites are always detailing.

And if you’re going to outsource your brain you may as well give the work to someone with a sense of humor, which is I’m pointing you to Dot Com Ments. Dot Com Ments are hand drawn images you can embed in comments around the web, some zany, some sarcastic, some funny, some not-so-funny.

Continue Reading “Dot Com Ments: When Thinking Is Just Too Much Effort” »