Changing Defaults

I hate changing my defaults.

For example, I’ve been trying to change my default browser back to Firefox from Chrome. I still feel chrome is faster and better for daily use, but Firefox is working better with some of my extensions lately, something I want to make more use of.

But no matter what I seem to do, I find myself back in Chrome.

It make’s me wonder how I got from Firefox to Chrome in the first place.

But the big change that I’ve made is to my password management. It’s  a change I’ve been meaning to make for over a year now, and have finally done it. Typically my passwords followed a rather simple theory. 3 Passwords. Low security, medium security, and high security. The high security one’s supported a variation scheme so I could make sure they were different from site to site. Low security was for things like forums that I could care less about.

Lately though, thanks to some hacker organizations, my passwords keep finding themselves compromised. It’s a side effect of being signed up EVERYWHERE online. As such, I’ve had to promptly change my passwords on some rather key sites. However, this time, I’m doing it different. I’m now using an open source tool called KeePass that allows me to generate a random password for every site I sign up for. This random password is then stored in a database on my local machine and somewhere on the mystical internet, behind another level of encryption that is protected with just 1 password for me…

What this mean for me? It means that if any of these sites are compromised, the only site I need to change the password on is that one site.

It also means that I become the single point of security failure (of course, I was before too, when I made use of saved passwords + master password).

I’d rather have a single point of failure as opposed to 100’s.

However, this change isn’t coming easy either. Doing this has made it difficult for me to get at certain sites away from my primary machine. I’ve found there are apps to help solve that problem, but it’s still more work than simply being able to sit down and type the password in. With time though, the steps will become routine…. and the price of my security on some sites is far to underestimated sometimes.

Of course, there’s no change happening with the status of the baby yet. Amber’s out walking around shopping with her mom right now in hopes that it might get things moving, but not likely just yet.

That change of course will not be easy either… But needed.

Happy 4th of July Everyone! Let’s all see if we can bring less dependence and some more independence back to this nation. (Change ain’t easy)