I put all my passwords in a text document, then print it on a little strip of paper and shove it up my ass. Whenever I take a crap, I dig it out from the turds and try to memorise some of them again. Then I shove it back up there where noone else can find my data and I won’t lose it.
Forgot to mention I delete the text document and set fire to the computer’s hard drive. The passwords are only ever in my ass, with the rest of my personal shit.
I guess now is as good a time as any for them to start using a proper password manager.
Personally, I recommend Keepass - it has multiple clients for all platforms, and you can keep the file in sync with a program of your own choosing, like Dropbox, syncthing or whatever you like.
I am hosting on Home Assistant which itself gets a backup to my Google drive and my personal machine. So there are two backups, as long as HA doesn’t create a corrupted backup 3 weeks in a row I am good.
Most amazingly, this setup is also unexpectedly resilient against merge conflicts and can sync even when two copies have changed. You wouldn’t expect that from tools relying on 3rd party file syncing.
I still try to avoid it, but every time it accidentally happened, I could just merge the changes automatically without losing data.
If you never, ever need your passwords outside of your home, that’s great advice - it’s as secure as can be against digital theft. Less so against fire though, and backups are out of the question.
You can have backups of physical books. Just copy the text from one to the other. Yeah it is manual work but so is writing the first one in the first place. You can then store the second copy in a fire resistant safe or at a friends or family members house (maybe inside a safe as well).
If getting a Dropbox account is too difficult for them, I seriously wonder why they’d be subscribed here, or reading articles about password management in browsers.
I don’t use the password manager in Firefox, what a terrible idea.
Use an independent password manager, something purpose-built.
And using Linux? Hahaha, right, right. Call me when there’s a serious OneNote, or even more importantly, Excel competitor. (Or even a standard shell on Linux, or the same set of tools built in).
OneNote works on the web, but there’s also Notenook if someone is looking for similar features with an app for offline access + End-to-end encryption and open source alternative. I’ve got it syncing to my Android, Windows, Linux and Mac clients without issue.
…or even more importantly, Excel competitor.
There’s OnlyOffice which has a spreadsheet. Yeah it’s not Excel which has existed for a million years, but it should work for the vast majority of users’ basic needs. It may not work for your specific use case, but it is a viable alternative that exists today. If you want more online collaborative features (like the o365 version has) you can use CryptPad, which provides an end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite, including the web version of OnlyOffice Spreadsheets.
Or even a standard shell on Linux…
What does this even mean? Nearly every major Linux distro sets bash as the default shell, and if not the default, is probably already installed and called if needed. Not sure I understand the problem here.
…or the same set of tools built in
Stick to a single OS and you get the same set of tools built in? This is a strange statement to be making against a system that not only thrives on diversity but has lots of niche systems that require a myriad of default tools.
I do completely agree about not using any browser’s built-in password manager.
It is not the software which can lack seriousness, but the developer and the user. One is proprietary where the developer controls the user’s computing - the other is free software where the user is in control (free as in freedom).
I agree that using browser-based password managers is not a good idea, but everything else you said was willfully ignorant.
OneNote isn't that special, and you don't need Windows to use it.
There are half a dozen excel competitors that are feature complete (OpenOffice, LibreOffice, GSuite, Zoho, Gnumeric...)
All shells use the same standard tools, excepting a few bulit-ins (because most tools are external to the shell). Some shells have different syntax, but most of them share most syntax. In 90% of cases, the default shell is bash, or an offshoot (dash, etc), which are all descendants of sh, so unless you're using an extended feature set, scripts are cross-compatible.
Firefox Sync was purposefully built too, they didn’t wake up one day to find it on the porch in a basket.
It syncs passwords, works on desktop and mobile and can do some other cool stuff — syncs tabs and bookmarks, alerts you to password breaches, send tabs from one device to another, lets you export your passwords etc. It’s a good password manager.
A better statement should be: you should remain vigilant and light on attachment to any banner. If an ill wind blows and you don’t like it, it’s time to move. Control your data- aspire to be a digital nomad.
Firefox isn’t without it’s own issues, recently. Google used to be viewed as a paragon once, too.
Once upon a time I think they were largely harmless … but once they started leaning into profit over quality they went rotten in a hurry. Exactly why I’m concerned with mozilla’s path.
Something like 2/3rds of the world uses chrome for desktop. I’d bet that number is higher for windows specifically. If you’re the rare person who doesn’t use chrome then you’re savy enough to know this doesn’t apply to you