Blizzard takes a page from the book of Paypal — that other site where dummies get their possessions stolen because they have an easy password — and launches its own magical keyring to give out digital codes (press a button, a six-digit code is displayed and you need to type it in addition to your login and password when you want to play). I didn’t like the idea when Paypal launched it, and I still think it’s an admission of failure. The problem is, that’s not really a failure you can do anything about, and you’ll never quite manage to educate users about not setting an easy password, and not giving it to anyone (and not running trojans on Windows, either).

Now, the choice is yours: do you want to pay six euros for your magical keyring, and have to type a stupid code every time you’re going to play, in exchange for the knowledge that, as long as the Authenticator is optional (and it can’t really become compulsory anytime in the foreseeable future), 99.9% of the hackers will prefer to attack non-authenticatored subscribers rather than try and break the code? (That’s how security works, and, yes, it’s sad.)