Being good is tedius

[susandennis]

When I first started needing personal passwords, I was a season ticket holder for the minor league baseball team, the San Jose Giants. So I used giants as my password for everything everywhere for years. To this day, if I try to open a new account somewhere and am told that susandennis is already taken for a userid, I'll try logging in with giants as a password and 9 times out of 10 it works.

Then sites started getting all prissy about making me use more complicated passwords. And all along everybody said to not use the same password everywhere. I've used a password manager - Last Pass - forever but have continued to use and reuse the most simple password I can get away with and use it where ever I could. All the warnings about how life as we know it will end if I continue to do this, none has been more cutting than the loud obviously disapproving sigh that my brother gives me whenever the subject comes up.

But, still I persist. Until yesterday. Finally, I decided to change my ways. And today I started. I went to all my financial accounts and one, by one, changed the password to something totally unintelligible and unrememberable and never used anywhere else by me. Things like NnUBfk6M3dUZY@D ...

And what a PIA. But, now it's done. Next I will do major players like Google and Amazon and Instagram, etc. Now, watch me get hacked in the next two weeks. Sigh.

The sweetest sound in the world this morning is the sound of Biggie getting kibble out of his kibble tree. He and The Smalls are, right now, shopping in the toy bin.

Today is house cleaner day. I will be long gone to the doctor's office when she gets here. I have a bag of Goodwill donations after that. Then maybe Grocery Outlet. I still need eggs.

Now we have gone from the sweet sound of Biggie eating to the squalling sound of the two of them arguing about something. At least we don't have the silence of lethargy anymore!

King on the mountain...

Comments

[maju01.livejournal.com]

Passwords are the bane of my life!

[carriea31.livejournal.com]

What made you finally decide to do the password updates after all this time?

[susandennis]

Great question and I appreciate your making me go back and find the link so now I have it in case I need it again.

It was this piece that was the straw...

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/28/21080122/avoid-hack-hacker-theft

[carriea31.livejournal.com]

Yikes. That sort of thing is terrible. I have all different passwords on my stuff but I guess none of them are really all that complicated. I should probably work on this also. When I was about 20 or 21, someone stole a bag of mail from the mail truck when it was parked on the street to deliver a package. Then they took the information off my check and used it to somehow steal $1300 from my account. The bank made it right as far as my account, but they told me the same thing as that person was told. Basically there is a fraud department who investigates and you never know what happens.

[roasted-beets.livejournal.com]

I tried LastPass but couldn't get comfortable with it. I found I liked Dashlane, used it for two years and then they hiked the price up - a lot. I decided to give LastPass another try since I had the good experience with Dashlane. And I STILL didn't trust it. I know it works. I know lots of people use it successfully. I'm just not comfortable with it and I pay Dashlane what they want.

The best part of password managers is you only have to remember one and they do all the rest.

[howeird]

It seems to me that the best time for a hacker to steal your password is when you are changing it, so I avoid doing so.