June 11, 2004

5:20 AM

Do you know of a free internet notepad service like Yahoo Notepad, but with https and maybe a few more bells and whistles? 2nd question: If I did find such a service, how stupid would it be to use it as my password repository?
posted by skryche to (6 comments total)

I don't know of a secure notepad option online, but as far as using an online site to store your passwords, it's probably not ideal...BUT, if you were to type all of the passwords in using a self-devised code, it would probably be OK.

For instance: if one of your passwords is: dEc1277
Then you could just add some dummy characters to it, like this: !dEc12!77

Just an idea.
posted by davidmsc at 6:10 AM on June 11, 2004

You're at the mercy of honesty of the technical staff and whoever purchases the assets if it ever comes to that. I've known somebody who bragged about two things:

1. Being able to grab any password from the database at his forum
   
2. The number of stupid people who recycled their forum password elsewhere
   

From your problem it's obvious you don't recycle passwords but if anybody with access is a miscreant it's possible that they'll have open access to all your accounts. The secure http protocol only protects you from crooks who're snooping you, not from crooks who are holding your data. I'm not saying it's stupid, but you should be aware (and decide on your own the severity) of the risks.
posted by substrate at 6:18 AM on June 11, 2004

Fastmail.fm, in addition to being one of the best on-line e-mail providers around, has a notepad feature. And you can visit the site with https or http, your choice.

I store my passwords encrypted on my PDA. Convenient, safe, secure.
posted by profwhat at 7:08 AM on June 11, 2004

Passwords to places like MetaFilter don't need much security, so a service such as this notepad would be useful. Your banking and insurance passwords however require greater security.
posted by mischief at 7:28 AM on June 11, 2004

The odds of them taking an interest in your little speck of yahoo notes is, admittedly, remote, but I still wouldn't feel too comfortable putting sensitive info there.

I have a friend who puts his passwords in a text file on a USB pen drive on his key chain. That seems fairly clever to me. It seems like nearly every computer nowadays can read those, but I haven't used a public web terminal ever, so I wouldn't know if they typically can.

However, if you're even contemplating this, I guess you're already doing better off than most of us since you actually have multiple passwords. I recycle the same couple far more oten than I should.
posted by mragreeable at 7:30 AM on June 11, 2004

Like profwhat, I store my passwords encrypted on my PDA. I use Keyring for PalmOS nee gnukeyring. If you don't have a PDA, it's still a good idea to encrypt your passwords before storing them. aesutil looks like it might do the trick: simply encrypt and base64-encode your text and post it anywhere.
posted by Eamon at 11:00 AM on June 12, 2004