Dear Linkedin,

Tue Jun 12 14:32:46 UTC 2012

On 11/06/12 12:38 AM, Alexander Harrowell wrote:
> A question: password managers are obviously a great idea, and password
> manager + synchronisation takes care of multiple devices.

Go ahead and use one of these password managers and load it with all 
your passwords.  Then load it's smartphone app on your smartphone, and 
report back how well it works to load your secure password into the 
Facebook App, the Flickr App, the Twitter App, the (fill-in-the-blank) 
App for the 1001 Apps you have on your phone.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no password manager that 
*seamlessly* syncs your password with a computer and with smartphone 
apps.  And in case you haven't noticed, more and more computing (and 
logging in) is done with smartphone apps these days.

This is still very much an un-solved problem.  Fixing it so it works on 
just one computer (using a password manager) is solved.  Fixing it so it 
works on several "regular" computers (synching password managers) is 
solved - although this also puts your passwords in the possession of 
another party (to allow the synching to work).  Fixing it so you can 
login seamlessly and easily from all types of computers including 
computers you don't own (when visiting/traveling) is NOT a solved 
problem, and if you use a password manager and think it makes your life 
easy, then you suddenly find you can't login to anything (e.g. you are 
traveling and lose your phone and need to login to your email account, 
with a password you don't remember, you only have the secure password 
for your password manager) you will find out how NOT easy this solution 
really is.

jc