Hacker News Reader

Write your passwords down on a piece of paper and put that piece of paper in your wallet. If you lose your wallet, well you just lost your credit card and maybe social security card too, so changing passwords ain't so bad.

Use incorrect answers for secret questions (wallet too).

View on HN

I think for most moderately-technically-inclined people, a decent password manager is going to be much more secure (and in many cases, more convenient).

If you steal my credit card, I'll just call my bank and cancel it (and I'm not liable for any charges you made, anyway). But if you break into my email (or even something like my Facebook, which might have weaker security), it might be really hard to recover from that.

For secret questions, I always use output from /dev/random (at least 1 kilobyte) and base64-encode it, then throw it away. Secret questions are just too weak for anything, they're useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com