brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
2020-05-28 05:25 pm

It's not just passwords we have to worry about with LJ, it's doxxing

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by [personal profile] siderea)


Brin has always had a separate email address from my legal-name one, which turns out to have been a good move since [the fact that [livejournal.com profile] brin_bellway is owned by someone with that email address] was stolen a few months later (also because of Tumblr quietly leaving on by default the ability for people to look up your username given your email address). If you don't have a separate email address for each of your identities, the second-best time is today.

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Also, while I'm thinking about this:

I have to say, I'm actually grateful for those spammers that--offering one of your passwords as proof--claim to have hacked your webcam and taken pictures of you masturbating, and demand a blackmail payment of Bitcoin.

Because while the story was ludicrous enough to be clearly false (ah yes, you got into my email with a password that isn't my email password, took over the webcam I don't have, waited for me to consume video porn I don't watch, and took pictures of me in a state that an untrained eye wouldn't recognise as sexual: ~oh no, the horror~), that *was* a genuine password. Not my email password, not a password I used for anything *super* important, but a genuine password that at the time was still in use.

It was one of the nicest possible ways anyone could have driven home to me that I needed to finally get my act together and get a password manager. Within the week, I had one all set up, complete with every account I could find.