Country Financial Ripped Me Off
On December 1st 2018 a freak warm front swept through the area bringing with it 29 Tornados. One of those Tornados was a devastating EF3 Tornado that completely destroyed many houses in my town. Over 400 homes were damaged by this Tornado which had wind speeds estimated at 155mph and was a 1/2 mile wide. Our house was in this Tornado’s direct path. We were fortunate enough that when the Tornado reached us it had lifted off the ground but the official storm track still put it coming right over our backyard. As a result we had extensive shingle and siding damage done. No face of the house was spared and we took damage from the extreme winds and flying debris on literally every side. My daughter and I were home at the time and ran to the basement as soon as we realized there was a Tornado nearby. We both suffer from PTSD from it to this day, with Tornado sirens setting off a near panic-state in her, and having adverse effects on me as well.
I had been a client of Country Financial since the day I turned 16 and got my license, only because that was who my Dad used at the time. As I grew, I continued to use them for multiple vehicles, multiple life policies, and our home policy. I had made some small auto claims in the past, none my fault, and had always been satisfied with how it was handled. I wish I could say the same for the Tornado damage to my house, but my experience was the exact opposite. Country Financial weaseled out of tens of thousands of dollars in necessary repairs and stuck me with the bill.
I’ve noticed a new phenomenon in recent times where a user of a certain product, be it a nas, a switch, a ip camera, wireless ap, or anything else really, posts up questioning why X device is making X number of repeated DNS requests. Just shut the hell up, seriously. This is normal behavior, it’s how DNS works. The device makes a request and the caching DNS server replies with the answer. This is how DNS has always worked, but these dim bulbs have been given a light in the window to the inner workings of DNS and have suddenly crapped their diapers about it. Also, the thought of offloading a critical network service like DNS to a $30 device is horrifying to me. But then again, like I said, Pi-hole users are the worst.
Seriously, it is 2015 now. Every big service provider should be supporting some form of 2-factor authentication. Google is a prime example of the right way to implement this, and everyone should be following their lead. This weekend I had an email account I hadn’t used in over a year get its password cracked. The bot then pulled my extremely outdated online address book and sent spam links out to them all. Fantastic! So, I changed the password and deleted all of the contacts out of the address book. Had this provider (cough… AOL …cough) had a 2FA implementation this would have NEVER been able to happen. Their service wouldn’t have been used to send out spam, and I wouldn’t look like a doofus with an apparently weak password on that old account.