Day: July 16, 2024

Don’t worry, this one is kind of fun and interesting.

I’ve been getting a Passwords Compromised notice in my browser for months. I’ve ignored it, as I suspect most people do.

Let’s face it, with every website demanding that you create an account, and so many of those websites being hacked almost instantly, you just stop paying attention.

For some reason, perhaps it’s that I’m cranky, this morning I decided to explore the websites that were compromised and change passwords or delete accounts.

I’m heavily favoring the latter over the former.

Anyhoo… 

I was surprised to note that on a lot of the “compromised websites”, my passwords were obscenities.

I know how most of these obscenities came to be my passwords. It’s about frustration and annoyance. In most situations, I was trying to take care of something completely unrelated to passwords and the website in question decided to force a password change.

Thus derailing my intent and turning what should have been a 90 second interaction into a tour de force of guessing what combination of letter, symbols, number, and special characters would please the website, allowing me to do what I’d accessed the website to do to begin with. That is, if I remembered what I’d gone to the site for in the first place.

Apparently “FuckYou96&yourmother^$#” Is commonly used. Who Knew?

“BlowMECocksuckers!-2021” and “LickMyFilthyhole-Asshole!9000” are also common.

This suggests that I’m not the only person who has become sick and tired of Websites, Their demanding that accounts be created, and “Secure” passwords.

Of the 36 websites whose passwords were compromised in various data leaks, I now have 16 left.

I’ve deleted the others. Honestly, do I really need a password and an account to confirm a haircut appointment? Uh, NOPE!

Since I canceled Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. There was no need for their residual threads to be stored in my browser, so I deleted them. The same with T-Mobile.

I was looking at a credit card login that used to work really well, then the rights to the card were purchased by another company and the new company website has never worked.

There’s no reason for me to maintain that login… Or that credit card account for that matter. I haven’t closed the account yet, but that day is coming and I’m looking forward to it.

The last stored password for that website is embarrassingly filthy! Which speaks to my frustration with the site, the creditor, and their offshore “customer service”.

Oh, that embarrassingly filthy password? It’s on the list of passwords that have appeared in various data breaches. Again, apparently I’m not alone in losing my temper trying to reset passwords.

Then there are those passwords that have been “Reused”. Except they’re not. Some of the banking sites are a conglomeration of websites with different domain names but who all use the same initial login.

These poorly designed banking sites trip the security settings because you have no choice but to reuse passwords due to the way the sites work. 

I would argue that these sites create a laissez-faire attitude because they cause end users to be endlessly warned about something they have no control over. Which results in the users being far more likely to ignore all warnings about passwords that their browser may present.

This is how someone like me ends up with 36 warnings that have gone ignored for months, years, decades?

Don’t get me started about cookies. More precisely, don’t get me started about the cookie notifications or the sites that feel it’s necessary to give you cookie notifications daily, monthly or anytime something changes on the site. (Yes, I know this site does that. Thank the EU!)

It looks like I’m not going to be able to delete these other sites for a while, so I’ll have to continue ignoring the warnings, or actually waste a ton of time changing the passwords. Ugh! That means I’ll be using the automatic password generator a lot.

You’d think that would make it easier but it doesn’t because it seems that the website designers create obstacles designed to prevent password generators from working.

I suppose I need to decide if I’m cranky enough that I don’t want to do anything else but mess with websites and passwords, or ignore the whole mess and do something else that I’d prefer to do.