While I’m not fond of complicated passwords, I can recognize their usefulness and need in such things as online banking. But I can sympathize with the OP.
I tried setting up a login with the local pizza place. This username was taken, that one was too. Finally, I found one that I could use, and entered what I wanted as a password. No good; not enough characters. Try again–nope, I need an upper case character. Next try; I need a number. Next try–something else is unacceptable. By this point, I can’t even remember what my fifth-choice username is.
Screw it; I gave up and reached for the phone. Twenty minutes later, I had my pizza.
From here on in, when I want a pizza delivered, I’ll use the phone. It’s faster.
The reason you should actually use a secure password for pizza and every other mundane thing is that a compromise there can lead to other compromises. A hacker may be able to get information about you or your password habits from the pizza site that can be used in other sites. Check https://haveibeenpwned.com and if your info is there, ask yourself if you reused the same password for other sites and if any of those sites saved your credit card info or if any of those sites used secret questions that are the same questions you used for your banking site. It may only be a pizza site but that’s no reason to be careless with any info that someone may find useful.
In addition to the Dropbox method, both Roboform and LastPass have “use anywhere” features. I subscribe to Roboform’s which $20 a year. I use Roboform with 2 Windows pcs, an android tablet and an iPhone. It works flawlessly and I don’t begrudge them the money (and there’s very few pieces of software about which I can say the same.)
Lastpass - which my Mom uses - has a premium version, which is $12 a year. I’m not really sure what you get with that though. I know my mom is using the free version between two laptops and never has any trouble signing in from the Lastpass online vault. She’s not using it with her phone or tablet, though.
Another option would be to use the freeware version of either service on your phone and then manually type in your passwords on your pc after looking them up. But that would defeat the ease-of-use.
I do have a throwaway password - and no, I’m not going to tell you what it is - for stupid webforms, put anything that involves my money, including pizza, gets a strong random generated password.
I will welcome the day when we have eyeball scan recognition for all password protected access and payments.
To me, using a secondary app to store a thousand used-once-maybe-I’ll-use-it-again website logins that I had to type in, and having a to open the app to find the password to log in to the once-in-a-blue-moon site is stooooOOOoooopid.
“You must have a symbol in your password, but only from this one particular list of symbols, which inevitably doesn’t quite match the default list your password generator/storage program uses for random generation!”
If P!zza is an acceptable password, but P1%%a is not, then your password requirements are stupid.
My local pizza place has the advanced technology of “caller ID” … they already know exactly what I’m ordering … I just grunt and the pizza is at my door in fifteen minutes …
I write 'em all down.
I know you’re not supposed to, but the group of people hacking into my computer accounts and the people breaking into my house don’t really overlap.
The benefits for desktop users is minimal. For phone, with free you have to login to your vault, find the website you’re accessing, copy the password, paste it into Chrome or whatever. With the paid version, you can tell it to autofill without the extra steps. The autofill plugin for desktop browsers still works after the trial expires.
Arbitrary password character/length limitations absolutely drive me up the wall.
The upper limit on password size really gets me, for instance my bank account has an upper limit of 14 characters. That sets off all kinds of red flags. It makes me wonder if they’re storing it in a cleartext document somewhere, because any reasonable hashing method is going to produce output that’s 70+ characters no matter what. The input size shouldn’t matter at all once hashing is done. And let me reiterate that this is my bank account; that’s my most important account!
Equally frustrating are accounts not letting me choose a particular password because it has an natural number sequence in it somewhere. My password is already 20 characters long, adding a 1234 to the end isn’t going to make it any less secure! And even if it did, so what? Let me be a fuckup if I want to! It my most basic human right to be a fuckup.
I liked the system at one former workplace of mine, back in the 90s: you didn’t get to pick your password. Every year, you were issued a new one. It was 8 characters, and semi-phonetic, so it was fairly easy to remember. So, for example, I had the password “ritrarlu”. You can almost pronounce it as a word, but not quite. And I can still remember it, 25+ years later.
