I have no confidence in computers anymore

I can't work the computer anymore. I just can't.
Everything needs to be done online. There are to many pins and passwords and security codes.
My bank doesn't even send me a paper statement - I need to get it on the computers. Then what?- I need to save it and back it up, but if I have it on the computer or online backup then the hackers will get it. So I encrypt the backup but then there is another password to remember. I store the passwords in a password keeper, but that needs a password - and then how do I safely backup the password keeper!?
Not to mention the expense. I can't afford to keep buying Macs and backup drives and apps and upgrades just to make everything keep working. All this just so I can get a bank statement. Then repeat everything over again for the taxes, bills and everything else.
I can't do it anymore.

OK. :thumbsup:

Dad?

see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya

I'll do it for you. Just send me your pins and passwords and I'll keep it all straight. You won't need to ever create a new password again.

And there are so many cables and cords and boxes and plugs and wires to make everything work, But if you want to see this months bank statement then you better have everything plugged-in set-up backed-up and updated to the latest version...
What other home appliance requires this much time cost and maintenance?

Why does such a hands-off personality even need to see their bank statements every month? Just call your bank and tell them to call your (rotary?) telephone if your balance dips below $1000, and then don't worry about it until they call you. /problem solver

Haven't looked at a bank "statement" in over 5 years. I log on to my bank's website at the end of every workday and check and make sure everything is as I expect. Who needs paper bank statements anymore?

But you still need all of the computers and password and codes and updates and cords expense and chaos just to go online to see it!

This is why iPad exists.

How is that different from the past world dominated by paper? If you're an adult, the world gets complicated, you need to worry about tax returns and terms of life insurance policies, how us managing a computer any different. Even if you are not Shaddim and buy cars for their inherent artistic qualities, but just as a means to get from work and back, you need to make sure it's in running order, no matter what. Computers are as ubiquitous as cars, perhaps even more so, so what's so strange about making sure your computer using running order, complete with backups and all?

1) I use 1Password to hold all my logins, passwords, etc. and sync them to all my computers/iOS devices. There is a plugin for Safari. When I want to login to my bank I go to my bank website, click the 1Password plugin, enter ONE password, and have it enter my login/password to my bank website. Done. I have to remember ONE password - the one for 1Password (get it?).

2) I have ONE cord coming out of my computer - the power cord.

I don't know if you are trolling are just posting for fun, but if you find using a computer complicated you are not doing it right.

Mailman brings bank statement or bills or other important stuff.
Stick it in the file cabinet and be done with it,
Odds of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are very very slight.
Compare with having to maintain a computing set-up with necessary backups and equipment and costs and hassles.
Odds of computer equipment dying/becoming obsolete? Practically guaranteed.

There's a shred of a point here, but there's a pretty easy way to cope with it.

You need:

1Password.
Dropbox.
An IMAP or better email account.
Cloud backup (I recommend CrashPlan, $8/month)

You need only to remember the 1Password password and the email password.

You email the 1Password database to yourself (it's encrypted). That way if everything blows up, you can recover the most important passwords in an emergency: Dropbox and CrashPlan. Once you're inside either of those, you can recover your whole current password database from the cloud.

Passwords are also easier than you've been led to believe.

"billiejeanisnotmylovershesjustagirl%" would take millennia to brute force. The single special character means the hacker has no choice but to brute force it, unless they know you personally and can guess your special character. A dictionary attack is useless.

To top it off, anyone is going to try and brute force common passwords first, then dictionary, then all numbers, then all lowercase, then all uppercase, then all upper and lowercase...

Look how much work they've done, and they aren't even close to your password yet.

Yeah but that doesn't really work when you get up around 10 different passwords for 10 different websites, because you don't have a way to remember that "billie jean" is the one for your Bank Jewels and "mac the knife" is the one for MacNN, oh wait maybe it could work... :P

Still you have to remember where the phrases start and end, and the lyrics themselves, and which is which, so the difficulty in remembering the pass phrases still scales with the number of sites. I had a similar system for years, but ultimately I caved in for a password manager.

This is a solved problem: get a secretary. I'll do it for you for free. Of course, you get what you pay for...

Edit: also you rarely have to keep backups of your passwords; I have never used a site that doesn't provide some mechanism for lost passwords. If you have a catastrophe, just use that (if keeping backups is too hard for you). Catastrophes aren't even as common as they used to be, I haven't had one since OS X came out in 2001.

You may find your computer is quite useful for more than looking at your bank account once a month. Most people find at least 3 or 4 other uses for theirs that more than make up for the hideous complexity and unholy tangle of wires and cables that crawl all over their otherwise spotless houses.

I put a six pack of Pepsi in the fridge but it wouldn't get cold. Everything else in the fridge is cold and it is working fine. Finally I called the customer support line for the fridge and they said that my model isn't compatible with Pepsi only Coke!

Life is pain

anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here: every time I have to do my taxes, I vastly prefer bills which I have received electronically, e. g. from amazon or other online stores. I have a folder in Mail and I just need to print them one-by-one. Finding and sorting paper bills (where I have to submit originals) is much more cumbersome. Also, I have electronic copies of all my important documents (e. g. PhD diploma and such), so I don't have to handle originals. They are all in one place and it's much faster for me to print scans rather than copy them. I'm glad that I can no longer lose airline tickets, I can take my iPhone and let them scan the QR code. Or print the eticket for my flight 20 times in case I have lost the previous 19 copies.
Just because you're changing computers regularly doesn't mean you lose any data. If you move from one house to another, you also need to take your folders with you? And you may lose them in the process if you are not careful. In the last few years, I have only lost three files or so, none of them were important (I accidentally dropped my iBook and the hard drive crashed hard). Backing up these days is easier than ever. Finding stuff on my computer is easier than finding a particular paper document.* Computers are not a luxury item, they are a necessity of life, just like cars and electricity. It's not a matter of whether you like computers or not, as you point out yourself, in many cases, you cannot live without them anymore.

* This is especially true since I live abroad and most of my paper documents are in storage some 8 time zones away.

You need a printer.

I'd be interested to see which applications actually hash or encrypt all of the 36 characters above.

There are certain UNIXes that if not configured from the default, ignore anything over 8 characters for a password. Dunno if OSX is like this.

Its even worse than that. The thing is 90% of the passwords aren't even that good. And the dictionaries they use aren't english language dictionaries they're compilations of previously used passwords. Then they mine those for patterns to generate more. For example: music lyric minus the spaces add non-ASCII characters between and at the ends. Dramatically reduces the search domain. Also even if there is an infinite number of passwords there are a finite number of hashes so you just need to find any password that will result in a matching hash instead of the exact one.

What pisses me off is all the diferent password requirements. Some places are 6 characters, some are 8, some are 10, some require one uppercase, some require a number, some require both... it gets annoying. Also, think of the time it takes you to enter a password. 5 seconds? Times how many times you do it in your life? That is a LOT of time.

I'm with tightsocks here. It's not that I'm against online access to things, or online payments, I just want to receive the bills in the mail, review them (since I do catch errors now and then), and schedule the payments myself. I find them a lot easier to review if they are printed, and I don't think it's too much of an imposition to have my vendor send me the physical bill. They all go in the "inbox" until I review and pay them a few times a month. And after paying them, they get filed by year, so if I need to refer to them later I know where they are (and yes, I have needed them occasionally). And every few years, I purge the old folders all at once.

(Still working on the optimal purging technique, but I've settled on purging all documents that aren't related to maintenance of assets after 8 years.)

I'll tolerate online-only billing for bills that don't change, like loan payments, or minor subscriptions like netflix. But for credit card and bank accounts, you will pry my paper statements form my cold, dead hands, no matter how many times you implore me to save the trees or give me a $5 credit.

Passwords are a whole different rant. I have a file on my RAID NAS storage box with all of our financial information. Every time I print it out, it goes obsolete within a month because I have to change another stupid password.


Edit: All you old people (like me) might remember when your bank used to send you all of your cancelled checks with your bank statement. Then, they stopped doing that once everything went electronic, under the theory that you could just log into your account and print the cancelled check images you need. This year, I had to get a copy of a cancelled check, only to find that the bank only makes six months of checks available online at any given time, and I had to call the bank to have them go into their archives and physically mail me the copy of the cancelled check. I'm not saying the older system was any more efficient, I just wanted to old-guy rant a bit more. Get off my lawn!

I do think it's annoying that online stuff is reuqired for everything. I set up my mac pro in my shop, where I do not have internet. I can do all my work on it fine, but I CANNOT backup/sync my iPhone, because it requires an internet connection to verify my apple ID for the programs I purchased. If I hit "no" it will erase many apps from my phone. Lame.

OS X only looked at the first 8 characters through 10.2.8

This.

Next problem, please. :-)

-t

I use Lastpass which deals with all my passwords, something I started just this year (2012)

I only have about 5 passwords and variations of those 5 passwords for everything. If I don't remember a password, I use the keychain. But I also have all of my passwords in a text file stored in a DMG encrypted folder just in case. Just my method.

What happens when you forget the password to that encrypted disk image or it gets fried/damaged?

You keep backups if it gets lost or damaged. As for remembering, well the alternative is that you do everything in person like people did before the internet. I'm guessing you gave up on using ATMs too?

I use the ATM occasionally. I rarely use cash though.

Don't forget also, you can reset all your passwords one by one if you somehow manage to lose access to your database. The nuclear option I guess.

But remembering a single password is easy, it's just the build-up of dozens of passwords that makes it hard.

Most people use passwords that are hard for humans to remember and easy for computers to crack, for example: Th1s1smyp4ssw0rd
Typically people take a word, then substitue non standard characters.

Instead, use passwords that are easy for humans to remember and hard for computers to crack, ideally four unrelated words strung together such as: househorsehundredhunters
The alliteration doesn't affect the security of the password and makes it even easier to remember.

Here's the science behind that approach:


http://forum-images.macnn.com/import/image_8088.jpg

Guess I better change my password now.

Dang all these complicated keys on my keyboard, I remember back when we only had two keys plus that special "any-key" to remember. Dag-nabit...where's my shotgun?

This won't work for most websites, because they restrict passwords to 6-10 digits.

-t

Most websites? I use this method all the time. If there are restrictions, they tend to be for a minimum password, length, not a maximum.

Does anyone have the number for the Communal Service Agency?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SDR8OO3FH5s#t=46 s

They might accept the password, but ignore anything past 10 digits.

This is the worst case: you think you have a safe password, but you got one or two words that can easily be brute-forced by a dictionary attack.

-t

Put your super-secret "%" at the beginning of the passphrases not the end

I think people may have been taking that which was simplified for the purposes of illustration too literally. I offer a different example below.

its&caturday&caturday


If you're not familiar with the rest of the lyrics, they go:

Gotta use the litter on Caturday
Here kitty, kitty
Here kitty, kitty
Here kitty, kitty
Here kitty, kitty

Everybody happy now?

Then that's like forgetting the combination to your wall safe, I suppose. You won't be able to access whatever is inside.

You could always hire a locksmith/safe cracker....
WIth a properly encrypted file there are not really any viable workarounds.

An encrypted disk is like a really secure safe where it is no longer feasible to open it without destroying whatever is inside in the process. If you don't encrypt your data, you can override user account passwords and the like if you have physical access to the machine.

Just like most people don't own a safe to store crucial documents, they also don't encrypt their data. And they don't back up their data. But in principle, it is easier and cheaper to keep electronic data safe than to keep important documents safe. Drive encryption is free and you can surly cover the costs of crash plan subscription for a decade for the costs of a sturdy safe or bank deposit box.

Computers are ubiquitous, and they're a necessity, I grant you that. I don't think you can get a regular job these day with a hand-written resume. It's not a skill reserved for a select part of the population.

Nevertheless, I do think I understand your sentiment, whenever it is time to do my taxes, I also feel it is a waste of my time. But it is part of life ...

Then you are really stupid and deserve everything that goes with it if you forget the password....

Backups to prevent being fried, damaged, stolen, deleted.

put your password on a sticky note, and tape it to the underside of your keyboard.

But put an extra ampersand.

Lulz ensue.