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Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Password hiding policy is insane

Ysabel by Daniel Panev from flickr (CC-SA)

Imagine you find yourself in some part of the world where people can still go to cafes, so you get a coffee, take out your laptop, and begin working on your spreadsheets or fanfics or whatever people do these days.

Then you remember that you're low on cat food. Let's see how security of that works out.

First you need to type cafe's WiFi "password". This password - completely worthless secret - will be turned into a bunch of ****** by your computer - so none of the people in the same cafe can even dare to see this.

Not to mention WiFi "passwords" are a conspiracy by broadband companies to sell more broadband, and really all WiFi should be completely passwordless and only prioritize the paying user over passers-by.  Most networks have very low utilization almost all the time, so it costs nobody anything. That's how we used to roll back in the '90s before big broadband successfully destroyed this social sharing model.

Anyway, once you get on the WiFi, you log into Instagram to check out some cat memes. Your social media password is of slightly more value than cafe's WiFi password, and your browser has decency of ******ing that too, so this part makes the most sense.

And then you remember, the cat food. You go to cat food website, enter your credit card number - all in plain sight of everyone in the cafe. Then secret three digit number on the other side of the card - all also in plain sight of everyone. Your name, address, and everything else one would need to literally steal your money - why, also all in plain sight of everyone who's in the same cafe. Also to every employee, as the cafe is fairly likely to have some cameras around, and it's really not hard to see what's on your screen with modern cameras.

How is this not utter insanity? Criminals don't care for your dinner photos, or your Instagram posts, or even really for your nudes or medical history (unless you're famous). For sure they don't care for WiFi passwords the tiniest bit.

The only thing they want is access to your money, and they can easily get it by just looking at your damn screen in a public place if you buy anything. And this is just one thing we in our utter madness decided to not hide, while we ****** every worthless WiFi password.

And it's not one online shop, or one browser doing this insanity. Everyone collectively decided to just be batshit insane about this for some reason. Did Russian mafia infiltrate Netscape back in the '90s and then we never fixed it, or are we all just so damn stupid?

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