Thursday, July 24, 2008

Where has the Penny Factory gone?

Last year I mentioned the Penny Factory and its handcrafted jewelry (I’ve decided to spell for our American friends today). The Penny Factory got a mention because I’d bought a pair of cufflinks from their stall at the Royal Norfolk Show.
Today, however, when I went to check their site to see if they’d updated it, as they were proposing to do I couldn’t even get near the URL I’d previously had.
BTInternet got itself in the way, and first warned me that I might be going to a phishing site – was I sure that it was a BTInternet site that I wanted. Well, after a bit of debate I decided, Yes, it was, because I’d used it before. So then I got offered the chance to put a ‘seal’ on the site, something that would only appear if I was trying to get into it. (This is the BT Yahoo site, not the Penny Factory one). So we created a seal.
Did that help? Not a bit of it. Now BTInternet wants me to put in the username and password I previously created when I last went to their site. But when I was last at this site there wasn’t all this rigmarole. So what the heck’s going on?
Meantime I tried to find the Penny Factory through Google. I can find it, but only as a street address. There’s no obvious sign of an Internet address anymore.
Which all seems rather strange. Plainly the BTInternet system has decided it doesn’t like the loose and easy way things used to be done, and has made itself so super security-conscious that you can’t actually use it!
So my apologies to anyone who’s tried to access the link from the post I did on the Penny Factory last year. It looks as if you may have trouble finding them.

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