Re: Gmane readers - please subscribe

[Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@eku.edu>]

Ben Finney <ben+emacs@benfinney.id.au> writes:

> Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@eku.edu> writes:
>
>> Ben Finney <ben+emacs@benfinney.id.au> writes:
>>
>> > A large part of my reason for reading via Gmane is to avoid yet
>> > another set of authentication credentials. Especially one that I
>> > never use; that's a security nightmare waiting to happen. So I'm not
>> > interested in increasing my security exposure by making a Mailman
>> > account on yet another site.
>>
>> Yikes! What nightmare awaits those of us who've foolishly gone ahead
>> and subscribed? What's my exposure, beyond some nefarious cracker
>> impersonating me on emacs-orgmode?
>
> The assumption here is that logging into the mailing list account is
> something done infrequently to never for any given user. That's
> certainly the case for just about any list I've subscribed to.
>
> For an infrequently-to-never used passphrase, one of two things is the
> case: either it's unique, or it is identical to the passphrase that
> accesses some other set of services for the user.
>
> Since it's an infrequently-to-never accessed service, it's an
> unreasonable burden to expect the user to maintain unique passphrases
> for every such service. If for this list, why not for every such list?

You know, Firefox stores passwords automatically nowadays. Like a lot of
people, I have many 'disposable' accounts with unique passwords, which
are stored in Firefox. I signed up for org-mode yesterday, and if I ever
need to log in again the password is stored in my Firefox profile. I
don't know about other browsers, but there was exactly one extra click
required for this to happen - "do you want Firefox to remember this
password?". So I have to disagree about the unreasonableness of the
burden here.


Tyler