[rhizome]

Passwords encourage people to use the same password across sites

I've heard this said about difficult passwords, but I think this is putting too fine a point on it. Passwords don't encourage anything on their own, except perhaps a consciousness of the basics of security. It's akin to saying that pizza encourages eating it for every meal. I don't think we've yet seen a gene that selfish.

[bnegreve]

> It's akin to saying that pizza encourages eating it for every meal.

I am also fine with passwords, but I really dislike useless parallels:

Passwords have to be remembered and therefore having many different passwords cause inconvenience. How does this apply to pizza?

[claudius]

I don’t know 95% of my passwords. Opera does, though, and so does a little encrypted text file somewhere on my harddrive. And neither of the two mind if my passwords are all of the form GgSGlIXrPE1IrbhgWFBU.

Of course, I only use one computer rather than five different laptops, three tablets and fifty-two smartphones, in which case I imagine it to be tedious to sync them (unless you trust Opera enough to use Opera Sync or some such thing).

[bruceboughton]

Off topic but 1Passsword is cross-platform, syncs via Dropbox and has browser extensions for auto-filling passwords.

[networked]

1Password is cross-platform in the sense that it works on Windows, OS X and mobile phones but it doesn't support Linux.

Since I need Linux support I use KeePass 1.x [1] on Windows and KeePassX [2] on Linux and Mac OS X. Both versions are free software. They store password entries in a single AES-encrypted container, use in-RAM encryption and allow you to attach a file with arbitrary binary data to each password entry (handy for key files). While there is no single Firefox extension that works across all the platforms they both can emulate typing for password entry. For synchronization I keep the encrypted password file in my Dropbox. If your use case is similar to mine I can highly recommend this solution because it behaves consistently across the platforms I've tried it on [3]. There's also KeePassDroid for Android that supposedly works well with Dropbox but I haven't used it.

[1] http://keepass.info/

[2] https://www.keepassx.org/

[3] The most exotic one being Debian PPC. Sadly, it didn't last since while KeePassX worked fine on it there was no straightforward way to get Dropbox running on non-x86 Linux and using a workaround like rsyncing with an x86 Linux machine running Dropbox or a VM introduced a large extra breaking point to the system.

[antinescience]

KeePassDroid is lovely.

I've never understood the argument against complex, unique passwords when there are numerous robust, free, and cross platform tools for pw management. It's far easier to manage one database of generated credentials than to remember even a handful of sets of simple auths.

[cscheid]

With Dropbox, you get 1password on linux via their html frontend (I use it all the time)

[abrowne]

You can view -- which I do appreciate -- but you cannot edit.

[claudius]

I guess, yes, but I don’t particularly like Dropbox and don’t see the need for syncing at the moment anyways. And for my passwords text file - org-mode (and epa) come with Emacs in Debian main, 1Password doesn’t seem to be there :)

[ams6110]

There is also PassPack. http://passpack.com

[seanp2k2]

Another great alternative is LastPass, which works in Linux / OSX / Windows / Android.

Sync that with your KeePassX and Dropbox and you might just be good to go.