Dear CalNet 2-Step Verification,
No one asked for you. No one logged into CalCentral before your villainous introduction and thought, “Hm… this is a little too easy.” No one stayed up all night tossing and turning, worrying about the security of their CalCentral accounts and whether someone was going to see their lackluster GPA — our GPAs are collectively so terrible no one would ever find joy in seeing someone else’s. No one ever stood in line at Crossroads wondering if a hacker was draining the funds from their Cal1Card account to eat nasty dining hall food. Yet, here we are, stuck with you forever, so it seems.
From the first time we were introduced to you through email, you were incessantly irritating. Last semester, our inboxes were flooded with messages requiring our action with the fun tagline “Why wait? Enroll in 2-Step now to avoid the trouble of getting locked out!” So sweet of you to think of us! After the flood of emails ended, we unwillingly downloaded your vomit green-colored Duo Mobile app. Fitting.
Little did we know that you would continue to haunt our lives. You make us nostalgic for the better days. Now, our heart rate spikes at the sight of your loading page, and we spend that millisecond hoping and praying that thirty days hasn’t passed. When that gray box turns into another box with three MORE green boxes in it, we know our worst fear has come true. You’ve forced us to choose our method of torture. Shall it be a phone call or perhaps a passcode? Reluctantly, we pull out our phones for you after we just put them away to study to access our fun and unique 6-digit Duo Mobile number. In the time it takes us to unzip our backpacks, unlock our phones and finally find and open the Duo Mobile app after clicking every other green app in our phone, we could’ve hit the “withdraw” button on CalCentral upwards of seven times.
What lame hacker would want to log into our CalCentral accounts? A flunking CS 61A student trying to prove they can do something, anything? In the initial email it was suggested that a hacker could:
1) Drop you from your classes
2) Change your grading options
3) Impersonate you and email others
All of these potential hackings just seem like a weird flex to us, but go off, UC Berkeley! We suggest to any lame hackers that instead of bugging our boring old CalCentrals, they could instead dive into the USC, UCLA or Stanford portals — clearly some more interesting stuff is going on there. Anyways, back to you 2-Step! We wish you were never introduced to us.
Sincerely,
The Clog
