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Let them paste passwords

ncsc.gov.uk

221–230 of 376 posts

Re: Let them paste passwords

#221
post #57

In general, more and more sites encourage me to just leave Javascript turned off all the time. If they break, screw them, I'll go elsewhere. The only sites "sticky" enough to make me put up with it are financial, and that's only because they all suck so changing solves nothing. 'Missing out' on Angular sites hasn't left me feel like I'm missing anything in my life. This ties in to the discussion of Craig's List the o…

> If they break, screw them, I'll go elsewhere. I think that option is going to greatly constrain where you are able to go on the web. The vast majority of ecommerce sites I visit will break with JS completely turned off.

Far fewer than you'd think, at least among the ecommerce shops I buy stuff from. And those are mostly the huge shops, which are mostly interchangeable as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Let them paste passwords

#222
post #57

In general, more and more sites encourage me to just leave Javascript turned off all the time. If they break, screw them, I'll go elsewhere. The only sites "sticky" enough to make me put up with it are financial, and that's only because they all suck so changing solves nothing. 'Missing out' on Angular sites hasn't left me feel like I'm missing anything in my life. This ties in to the discussion of Craig's List the o…

So no Google Maps for you? I remember mapquest 20 years ago where you'd pan the map by clicking arrows and reloading the page. Good times! Usability totally won that day.

I use Apple maps when I need them, but that isn't often. I don't drive much, and when I do I use Navigon for turn-by-turn, which I bought before that feature became a free thing.

I don't use Google services in my personal life. (I have less control over vendors at work.)

Re: Let them paste passwords

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of my best passwords were phrases copied from discarded cartons on my desk. For example, I could choose a password, > Distributed_By: WalgreenCo. 200 Wilmont Rd. And it would both be very strong, and be difficult for someone at my desk to guess by looking at things on my desk.

And how do you remember which item on your desk is for which site/password?

Post-It note under the keyboard

Re: Let them paste passwords

#225
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that a lot of us are assuming that pasting encourages the use of password managers. However; I worry that this is a very BIG assumption. Even in my IT-literate circles password management usage is low. In my non-IT circles it is non-existent, and not because of SPP particularly; I suspect SPP (which I agree is silly) derived from an understanding that allowing an average person to paste passwords mea…

> Even in my IT-literate circles password management usage is low You are forked if your manager is ever compromised. It's only a matter of time until a major breach happens with a popular password manager.

>You are forked if your manager is ever compromised.

You are forked if your machine is ever rooted too. Security isn't about perfection, it's about economics and threat models. For the average person the biggest fundamental risk comes from one of the vast numbers of services they use, none of which they have the slightest control over or knowledge of, getting breached, bought, leaked or whatever. As long as we need to use passwords (long past any technical reason for it, but legacy and inertia tends to make change extremely had) for authentication, it will in turn remain necessary for people to use passwords for every site that are good (random of sufficient length), unique, and can be changed at any given arbitrary time (in case of service compromise). It is simply not possible for most humans to handle all that in their heads, perfectly and indefinitely. Which in turn leads directly to password managers, end of story. It's not a matter of them being ideal or even desirable, they're necessary under current common authentication practices.

>It's only a matter of time until a major breach happens with a popular password manager.

Explain what you mean by this? Most password managers operate purely client side, and all actual password managers perform encryption client-side, there is nothing to "breach" to get general access to a wide swath. A persistent targeted threat is an entirely different scenario. Or did you mean you expect the password manager application software deployment system itself to get breached and thus release a malware infected update? That though isn't an issue limited to password managers at all, it's one that you can at least somewhat counteract yourself since it's ultimately on a system under your control (and there are OSS password managers, etc), and password manager devs have better domain knowledge and specialization then some random service.

In terms of threat model it's a no brainer. It's disappointing to see continued protestations against password manager usage on HN of all places, short of some theoretical discussion of switching everything to proper public key auth. Even a full court industry push starting tomorrow though wouldn't eliminate passwords for likely years if not decades, and in the mean time everyone has to make the best of it.

Re: Let them paste passwords

#226

Of course it reduces security. It makes you resort to either 1.) typing it out manually while you can't see if you made a mistake 2.) using developer tools to set the 'value' attribute directly "SPP" discourages use of a password manager. End of story. I also see this pattern used on banking websites for inputs like an account number. This drives me crazy as well for the same reason. The computer can get it right mor…

3) use an auto-typing tool to type in your password for you

eg. echo "type password" | xdotool -

Re: Let them paste passwords

#227
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're cherry-picking pretty heavily: there's a lot of cargo-culted password advice but the current push for user-friendlier password management practices and fundamental model changes (e.g. two-factor with U2F) has been lead by security experts who have, for many years, been loudly reminding everyone that usability is a security requirement rather than an inherent conflict.

You are probably right about cherry picking. I know a lot of experts are aware of the problems but from an end user perspective security usability is still horrible and inconsistent.

No argument there — it's really interesting seeing the divide ultimately becoming users and experts on one side and people who are not experts but are setting policies anyway on the other.

Re: Let them paste passwords

#228
post #57

In general, more and more sites encourage me to just leave Javascript turned off all the time. If they break, screw them, I'll go elsewhere. The only sites "sticky" enough to make me put up with it are financial, and that's only because they all suck so changing solves nothing. 'Missing out' on Angular sites hasn't left me feel like I'm missing anything in my life. This ties in to the discussion of Craig's List the o…

So no Google Maps for you? I remember mapquest 20 years ago where you'd pan the map by clicking arrows and reloading the page. Good times! Usability totally won that day.

> no Google Maps for you?

I roughly use OpenStreetMap 80% of the time, Bing 5% and Google Maps 15%.

Looking up where an address is? OSM. Routing? OSM. Opening hours for places I go semi-regularly (but not often enough to remember them)? OSM (I put them in myself). Footpaths, caves, info on towers (like GSM/3G), public transport routes, etc.? OSM.

Aerial imagery? Bing (much faster than Google Maps).

Traffic info? Google Maps (I'm still casually looking for alternatives). Searching a shop? Google Maps.

In the Netherlands OSM is of equivalent quality in some categories (road network, addresses), better quality in others (trails, meta info about towers or cave entrances or so), or worse in yet other categories (information about businesses, at least outside of city centers).

Re: Let them paste passwords

#229
I find the issue around clipboard security a bit disturbing. No program should be able to access the clipboard at will, it should only get the data there if the user pastes it in the application. This is a bit harder at the API level, but I think a good environment would do this right. It's like the security holes in X that are being closed with Wayland.

Re: Let them paste passwords

#230
post #220
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowing + in an email field is one of my pet peeves. Congrats on finding an amazing-looking regex for email validation instead of thinking about it.

well, string+{whatever1}@gmail.com mails are redirected to string@gmail.com. So a user can just open account for string@gmail.com and then use that to open thousands of user accounts on the site that allows "+" on the email field. (I used to do this on sites that allowed limited number of free downloads after which you had to pay)

But that's not a feature of email in general. That's a feature of gmail, and a few other email providers that have followed suit. For email in general, foo@bar.com and foo+baz@bar.com are distinct emails that may go to different users.
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