On 11/06/12 12:38 AM, Alexander Harrowell wrote:
A question: password managers are obviously a great idea, and password manager + synchronisation takes care of multiple devices.
Go ahead and use one of these password managers and load it with all your passwords. Then load it's smartphone app on your smartphone, and report back how well it works to load your secure password into the Facebook App, the Flickr App, the Twitter App, the (fill-in-the-blank) App for the 1001 Apps you have on your phone. To the best of my knowledge, there is no password manager that *seamlessly* syncs your password with a computer and with smartphone apps. And in case you haven't noticed, more and more computing (and logging in) is done with smartphone apps these days. This is still very much an un-solved problem. Fixing it so it works on just one computer (using a password manager) is solved. Fixing it so it works on several "regular" computers (synching password managers) is solved - although this also puts your passwords in the possession of another party (to allow the synching to work). Fixing it so you can login seamlessly and easily from all types of computers including computers you don't own (when visiting/traveling) is NOT a solved problem, and if you use a password manager and think it makes your life easy, then you suddenly find you can't login to anything (e.g. you are traveling and lose your phone and need to login to your email account, with a password you don't remember, you only have the secure password for your password manager) you will find out how NOT easy this solution really is. jc