That being said, I think that there should be room in gaming for both types [and those inbetween I guess] that try to be realistic as possible and those that outright state that they’ll never even bother with it. Diversity is a great thing, I think, and there are plenty who enjoy all types of games.

a) storing them
b) storing them in plaintext
c) being vulnerable to hacking

It’s very easy to say that the obvious solution is to fix the easiest of these problems, notably (a), but that comes with usability costs, as do all the other schemes people suggest to make passwords more secure. A more palatable solution is to fix both problem (b) and (c), neither of which are intractable.

Additionally, my use of the term ‘retrieve’ wasn’t necessarily intended to mean they need to store the password itself, but they should store information such that I can rediscover the password – eg. a secret question.

here is a link of the Team behind it:
http://google-plus-network.blogspot.com/p/google-project-team.html

I don’t think so either, but I don’t see why it has to be one or the other. Nothing a site owner can do will protect people from the most dedicated hackers, so the user shares an equal burden in protecting themselves.

You’re either vigilant, or you’re at risk. Better yet, you’re either vigilant, or you’re *more* at risk.

Yes, I thought this was obvious. Apart from the bit where a user has one password for the password manager, and has to use that across all devices they want to use the internet from, providing such a program exists on all devices, and that all devices are secure from keyloggers, etc etc. People gloss over the negatives of password managers as if the only thing a user has to worry about is a leaked password being shared. Password managers in their current form are impractical for most people and that’s how it’s going to stay. We have to find a better way.

“Absolutely untrue. In this particular case, the attackers had unfettered access to a plaintext password database.”

You seem to have missed the part where I said, “if the site is coded with any attention to security”. We shouldn’t have to choose passwords on the assumption that they are going to be shared on the internet. That is awful for usability and shifts responsibility for these problems from the hackers and companies with poor security, where it solely lies.

“If the site was more secure, it may have stored only the MD5 hash of these passwords.”

We both know that storing a plain MD5 of just the password is not much better. That is not really what I mean by suggesting companies take security more seriously.

“Security and convenience will always be at odds with each other.”

Maybe so, but at the moment we are so far from either of those that something has to change – and I don’t think making the average user’s life more awkward to save site owners from having to implement decent security is the answer.

The point of using a password manager is **so that** you don’t have to use the same password twice. Obviously if a site’s database gets leaked then someone has your password and it’s now totally insecure. What they don’t have is your password for EVERY OTHER WEBSITE YOU VISIT.

We’ve already seen on twitter the past couple days people going and randomly trying these email / password combinations on facebook / paypal / amazon.com and then charging these innocent people with a bunch of money. That simply would not have happened if they had used strong passwords and a password manager.

————
“In practical terms the only people at risk with their bad passwords are the 5% or 6% who choose things like ’123456′ or ‘password’ – the rest, who might just choose a dictionary word, have nothing to fear if the site is coded with any attention to security.”
————

Absolutely untrue. In this particular case, the attackers had unfettered access to a plaintext password database. If the site was more secure, it may have stored only the MD5 hash of these passwords. The attacker could then have simply downloaded the password database from the compromised site and run John The Ripper against it offline, I guarantee you in less than 2 days most of the passwords would be cracked, including most of the ones not in the BOTTOM-20 frequency.

You know what, MAYBE THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED? For all we know it could be. They could have run John the Ripper against a hashed password database with far more than 62,000 entries, but only uploaded 62k because the rest of the passwords were secure and couldn’t be cracked fast enough. If your password is, for example, Frankestein123 I *guarantee* you it will get destroyed in no time flat by a modern cracker even though it’s long and has uppercase, lowercase, and numbers.

You mention KeePass as being no good for the average user, but you will never get around that. Security and convenience will always be at odds with each other.

But telling people that having strong passwords is pointless is a terrible thing to do.