Get 1Password and then get more out of it

Posted by William Gallagher

You should be using 1Password. I don’t care if you’re on Mac, iOS, Android or Windows, you should be using it. I’m not a blind fan, I find fault with it, but it’s a password manager and you have to have passwords so you have to have a password manager. In my opinion, 1Password is the best of the lot. Plus, it’s free.

If you’re looking at me wondering what a password manager is and whether that’s a real job, think of the last time you bought something on Amazon. Or logged into your email. Or opened Evernote from a new machine. You have to have passwords and you can’t use “donaldduck123” any more. You also can’t use 7J8d7fdJK(** – if you use that same one for everywhere.

A password manager creates these strong passwords for you – and then it remembers them. All you have to do is click a button or press a key and it zooms you off to Amazon, say, and it logs you in.

But that’s not why I want to talk to you about it today.

By dint of what it does with passwords, 1Password is extremely useful in other ways. It’s great at being your bookmarking for websites; it is really good at filling in credit card details; and it actively helps you when you’re being good and making a note of your new software licence.

Go read all this at length on the tutorial I wrote about it for MacNN.com today.

The password is dead – ish

Posted by William Gallagher

There’s a new move to get rid of the password. I think I’d rather miss them but it is a bit 11th Century, isn’t it? Halt! Who goes there? Are you fr1n3d or f03?

We have already reduced them a lot with apps like 1Password – you just remember one password, it remembers all the rest securely and also creates very strong new ones when you want – and then there are tools like Touch ID on iPhones. I don’t have an iPhone with this but I’ve used them and it is nothing short of spookily handy to be able to pick a phone up and have it already know it’s you.

Still, back to the news. Passwords are under threat and it’s about time too:

Passwords are a pain. They’re incredibly important for the security of our data, and yet they’re hard to remember and keep track of. Plus, it seems like we constantly have to change them as the result of some new hack or security breach. But the password’s days may be numbered: the FIDO Alliance—a non-profit composed of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and more—has published its final specification for a system to kill the password, hopefully for good.
The specification is a bit technical, but what it boils down to is fewer passwords, hopefully. FIDO offers two options: a password-less login method, and a two-factor login method. In the former case, when you register with a new service, app, or site that uses FIDO’s technology, you choose how you want to authenticate that account (just as you would currently specify a username and password). But instead of a password, that method can be a PIN or a biometric factor—such as a fingerprint, a spoken passphrase, or facial recognition.

The Death Of The Password Starts Today (Maybe) – Dan Moran, Popular Science (10 December 2014)

Read the full piece. And while we wait for all this to happen, get yourself secure with 1Password. I’ve used 1Password 17 times this morning.

Exploit 1Password even more

Posted by William Gallagher

There are things you do every day that you don’t realise others have no idea about. This week I demonstrated 1Password to two friends and told them that actually, no, we had to stop to discuss this because it was my civic duty. They’d just told me they use the same password everywhere. Yes. I shuddered too.

And I showed them 1Password. But it was a quick race through how I use it on my iPad whereas there is more you can and I do use on the Mac. This article by Melissa Holt popped up just as I was thinking about this and I think she says it better than I do. Except for one thing: I’d point out that while she and I are Mac users, all of this applies to the Windows version of 1Password too.

Here. Have some enthusing and then the start of tips to get more out of it. If you have 1Password, go use all this stuff now. And if you don’t have it, thank you for reading so far through this piece and see? Isn’t it great? Usually?

It’s no secret that AgileBits’ 1Password is pretty much my favorite thing since ever. It’s the one app that I recommend to all Mac users, and I’m passionate about people using the program to generate and fill in unique passwords for all of their online accounts. Let’s face it, if you aren’t using an app like 1Password to manage your digital life, then you either have a notebook full of your login details (not safe!) or you’re using 75 variations of your dog’s name as passwords on the sites you visit (doubly not safe!).

If you already have 1Password, though, there are a few neat tricks to be aware of to get the most out of its awesomeness. My favorite tip is that in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, the keyboard shortcut Command-\ will either automagically fill in the login for a page you’re on, or if you have multiple logins to pick from for that site, it’ll bring up the dialog box for you to choose between them. That’s much faster than clicking on the toolbar icon to open it!

3 Tips to Make 1Password Even More Powerful – Melissa Holt, The Mac Observer (12 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Keep 1Password 4 around after you upgrade

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m waiting to hear back from the makers Agilebits and will update this as I can. But my copy of 1Password 5 is lacking five passwords – that I know of. It happens that I created five this week as part of a particular job so I both know they were in 1Password 4 and I needed them today for that work.

Not a sign of them in 1Password 5 or, where I first went for them, the mini 1Password in my Mac’s menu bar.

But they are all still there in 1Password 4.

Now, Agilebits doesn’t recommend you having two versions of 1Password and if they tell me that’s my problem, I’ll believe them. Except, I’d dragged 1Password 4 to the wastebasket.

It is fluke that I hadn’t emptied it. And if I had, I’d have lost those passwords.

With the previous Dropbox bug that Agilebits had eventually copped to, that makes nine passwords I’ve lost – that I’ve found out about.

More when Agilebits responds.