Long ago I grew tired (and mostly annoyed) with MySpace and haven’t been back in some time. Mostly I’ve stayed away because of the site’s horrendous UI, purposely poor design (to drive additional page views), band spam, and the fact that my friends have migrated to twitter and/or Facebook.

But there was also a small part of me that was disgusted enough by MySpace’s security practices that I just didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They’d created a culture on the site that was just not that much fun to me.

I logged on this weekend to check out what I’d missed out on (meaning: clean the massive spam from my message and friend request inboxes). I realized I needed to change my email address to my current email. The email MySpace had on file was a dead account. Apparently, in order to change your email, you need to have access to your old account and your new account. I’m assuming that the phishing problems is the reason for this oddity. But even more odd is what they ask you to do it if you don’t have access to your old account:

If you are not comfortable sending your password, you may send us a salute. A salute is a current photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign containing your friend ID. Your friend ID is located in the web address bar immediately after “&friendid=”. Please do not use one of your profile pictures.

Well… that’s a new one. I’m still trying to figure out why this is more secure than skipping straight to the new email address. If someone has access to my account, couldn’t they change my pictures to match the one they send over as a “salute”?

Either way, more MySpace security weirdness. I just feel so dirty after I’ve spent too much time on the site…