Overdue Tech Upgrades

I'm certainly one of those oldschool type of people, where I don't jump into something right away. I let it go for a while before I get on board and then I start to make some moves to get in the right direction. Some may say that it's foolish, but for me, it's a little bit of a safety measure.

I recently made some upgrades to the various things that I use on a daily basis. I know that with the tech world moving at such a rapid clip that it is today, these things are coming at us left and right and all directions. Realistically, humans can't change and adapt quick enough to be on the cutting edge of everything so that in itself is a hopeless battle. There are some small changes that we can make though to start incorporating things into our lives that do have some pretty sizable impacts and improvements!

The impact that I'm enjoying is the use of a password manager to help generate and store my passwords for the various things that I log into on a daily or weekly basis. This is an important step because although I would like to say that my passwords that I use for the various logins are pretty good, at the end of the day they aren't that good when compared to something that a password manager can generate. It just goes to show that yes we can have it on the human side of it which is all well and good, but sometimes we just need to adapt and make necessary changes.

The password manager is a relatively secure way, depending on the manager you choose of course, to generate and store your passwords. For those of us on Hive we are incredibly familiar with this concept if you use Hive Keychain! I've been a user of keychain for years on Hive but for whatever reason, I didn't incorporate this same type of strategy in the real world with the other things that I do. I finally bridged that gap and it feels pretty good to have done so!

Getting the passwords onto the new keychain app that I chose has been a little tricky - having to go to the website and log in but also change the passwords and relinquish control over that password to the manager. It's not an easy thing to do but at the same time, it's for the best overall. The people who hack or get passwords that are leaked are scouring the internet to have it pop up that someone's information on a site is available so they log in with it and then try a bunch of other apps and sites. For me, I've thankfully insulated myself against this a little bit by having an old habit of using bullshit fake email address accounts for the stuff I really don't care about, and passwords that match the same mentality. If a hacker gets those credentials, then have at it because none of the information on there is accurate, and certainly the credentials aren't shared among other sites.

Still though, there is always the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that we have to cover as many bases as we can, but also be reasonable. We can't go off the deep end and scan our houses on a daily for bugs or taps or some bullshit like a schizo would. That's not conducive and actually plays into the paranoia that's rampant in today's world. What we can do though, is make sure that we take a few extra precautionary steps in the right direction so that we protect ourselves as best we can.

At the end of the day though, one of the important things is to also simply write these things down. I have to write down my litany of steps and other things for my wife and son just in case I drop dead tomorrow, so that they can access and take care of everything they need to. Including the password manager is going to be one of the next steps to take!

What about you, have you used a password manager yet? If not, why not? Leave me some comments!