Amnesiac Remember Me?

Log-in... being careful I am not doing so from a thread because the site locks onto that, or rejects your attempts to log on.

It asks for e-mail address and password then invites "Remember" so it keeps the pass-word.

It did. Not now. I can tick the little box but it does not work.

Has the site been changed or is this an effect of having gone from Internet Explorer to Firefox?

'

I should add I moved over only because IE was finally turned off about a week ago, presumably by µSoft.

Mr. Gates' people had been telling me for some time to convert the allegedly our-of-date IE to 'Edge'. So I tried, with considerable misgivings, but its intallation routine would neither Save nor Run! Presumably because I was expecting it delivered by IE - a sort of circular ill-logic .

Luckily I had installed the incandescent vulpine a while ago because at the time it gave direct acces bypassing Google's eavesdropping filters. I am not entirely impressed though by it offering no clear way to organise my growing "bookmarks" list.

When I use this forum, I frequently skip back and forth to other sites and don't want to keep logging back on. My method is to go to the log on page, and then before doing anything else, go back to forums. Then when I go to log on, a little box appears which I tick and log on. Then until switching off the pc, I can skip back and forwards from various sites without having bother.

Using MacOS 10.12 Sierra I need to hit the remember box before retrieving my e-mail address and password from the Safari database.

If I enter the e-mail and password first it waits afew seconds and dives straight into the log on process ignoring the remember box.

Some other forum sites behave the same way.

Clive

Not sure if you have any specific requirements for organising your Bookmarks, but for a basic "create separate folders to keep related stuff in" approach, you click on the icon in the upper right that looks like three vertical lines with a fourth line leaning against them.

Then select Bookmarks

At the very bottom of the list that appears, you will see Manage Bookmarks

Click on that. The Library dialogue will open, which is basically like File Explorer, so in there you can create and delete folders and sub-folders, drag bookmarks from one place to another, rename them, etc.

Hope that helps.

Regarding the apparently poor memory of this site, it may be that you have Firefox set to clear cookies or not remember passwords or something similar.

Rob

Thank you.

I am slowly finding my way around the "Bookmarks" system!

MS IE used to help you sort files alphabetically, then decided to make you do all that manually. Firebox seems the same - you have to drag their titles up or down the list.

Ah, you might be right about the cookies and passwords thing. I'd not thought of that.

I have discovered I can now view certain of our suppliers' web-sites that had become inaccessible from IE, I believe because they had been transferred to a different protocol or security system.

While you are battling in this state of change, I recommend trying a password manager - I use lastpass but licence terms are changing or have changed for the worse. There are other free ones for private use. The google chrome password manager is good

You still have to 'log in' but it is simples. And life becomes much more secure as you can use insanely complex passwords, different for each site.

And it results in a handy database of all sites you have accounts for - like auto-bookmark - which you can search and annotate

Edited By jaCK Hobson on 29/05/2021 08:34:00

When you click the 'remember me' box you get a cookie set that 'maintains state' so your credentials are maintained. You probably have set the browser to, clear history, delete cookies or use private mode so then the cookie gets deleted when the browser closes and you have to log in again. (not such a bad thing in my opinion)

I would also echo what Jack says above

Edited By Paul L on 29/05/2021 08:56:02

Edited By Paul L on 29/05/2021 08:58:22

On Firefox you can select which cookies you want to be permanently kept such as log-in cookies, all others should be deleted when you log off or you will end up with hundreds tracking you.

select 'tools' then Privacy & security, scroll down to 'cookies & Site data' and select 'manage exceptions.' In another tab or window log in to your forum & then cut & paste it into exceptions,

select 'allow' and then save. If it doesn't work first time then repeat as it sometimes needs this.

The site does log people out after a period for various reasons. One of which is that it was not originally anticipate that quite so many people would be active on the forum.

Neil

Thank you for these tips.

I do have a "passport manager". It is a list. I use a different user-name and password for every site etc., and some are random characters. Others are real but altered words and numbers not relevant to the site itself.

(At work, we had to change our desk PC's pw every few months. I used all sorts. One concatenated the electrical company's post-code and telephone-number on a nearby switch-box label. Others were modified cave-names or model-engineering references, the former being particulary arcane.)

'

The change to Firefox has had another, strange effect.

Typing an e-post, normally I would start:

-Salutation, CRLF key, first letter of the message on that next line.....

Only now, somehow CRLF turns off the rest of the keyboard at that point!

I have to start the message immediately from the end of the greeting, step back, insert the break then carry on as normal. Only BT can sort that one out I think, but their "Help" system is so bad even by IT company standards that it's probably easier to learn to live with the fault!

I use Firefox, it has a facility storing logon details for sites you choose. I use it for this forum, for instance. I also use a password manager called KeePass. It's free and works really well - I wouldn't be without it. There's no way I could manage all the 130-odd passwords I've ended up with without some help.

Before I retired we had to change login passwords regularly and a reminder appeared on screen.

Anyone found logged in and nowhere near the PC found themselves having a chat about security with their manager.

Edited By V8Eng on 01/06/2021 12:20:56

How secure is a password manager though?

Mine is simply a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets aren't secure at all, even worse now you've confessed on the internet! I hope the file isn't called passwords.xls Password Managers are always encrypted, and decent ones are almost impregnable.

For what it's worth, I recommend never using remembered login and password features. They undermine security and are unreliable in operation. A bad habit that saves a little typing in exchange for introducing several non-obvious security loopholes. Roughly equivalent to leaving the front door unlocked while you pop out shopping...

Dave

Thank you Dave.

Most of my registrations have non-stored passwords, which like my user names, are different for every site anyway.

I suppose the safest really is a hand-written list! I would change more passwords more often if more site managers make it easy to do so. Some, including my ISP, make it very awkward.

My Password Manager is an A5 ringbinder. Keeping passwords on the computer is a bit like leaving the keys for the safe in an envelope on top of said safe.

Edited By Anthony Knights on 03/06/2021 08:49:11

An Ringbinder is only as secure as whatever protects it, basically useless if the house is burgled. Ringbinders aren't secure in themselves. Locking one in a safe hidden under the floor would help!

Hacking computers is more difficult than housebreaking, and even if the operating system's login/password is bypassed by physically removing the disc and reading it with another computer, a password manager is still safe because it's contents are encrypted. To get the passwords it's necessary to break the password managers cypher, which in any half professional product will be seriously difficult. Not a paper and pencil job.

Note that removing a disc and mounting it on another computer allows the new computer to read everything on the disc that's not encrypted, which is why Nigel's spreadsheet isn't secure. Safer if he encrypted it, but spreadsheet encryption may be weak.

I don't use a password manager! Instead, one of my various notebooks contains passwords disguised in aide-memoire form and scattered amidst other information. The passwords are a random mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation at least 8 characters long. Login names and passwords aren't stored side-by-side in the book, so it's not obvious what the aide-memoires refer to. Not strong enough to defeat a government agency determined to crack the system, but too difficult for the average crook, I hope!

It's about striking a reasonable balance between risk and cost. There's no point in protecting a computer that doesn't contain sensitive information or do online banking or shopping. But don't be naive either. If the computer contains anything of value, protect it.

Dave

If I did get broken into and robbed, I think the robber would be more interested in grabbing the laptop and a few other portable valuables and leaving as quickly as possible. He would hardly be likely to go raking through bookshelves of catalogues and manuals on the off chance he would find anything useful.

Try putting a password on the actual hard drive and then put that in another machine. When I tried it I was asked for the hard drive password before the operating system would boot. The way round that is to do a quick format (from Linux) and then use a software file recovery tool to restore the files.

My latest PC which came with Windows 10 has a thing called "bitlocker" which I believe encrypts the hard drive. This has a 48 digit recovery code, so I'm hoping that would be secure enough for you.

Anthony

Acting on that advice I did remove the password speadsheet by printing it - I can hide a sheet of paper easily enough - but rather than simply deleting the file, I erased all the entries, saved that, then covered the entire page with blocks of random characters, saved that...

Having done so I changed a few key pass-words, but I had not envisaged the problems that caused with BTInternet as its warnings, prompts and instructions are very vague and ambiguous. It does seem that the more important the access codes are, the more difficult the company involved makes them to change, and the more remote its help and advice service!

'

I'm afraid some of the other solutions such as swapping drives around from one computer to another, Linux and recovery files are beyond me.

One way I have hidden access codes was to quote them from real or realistic technical specifications such as found on electric motor labels or my car's VIN plate, but keeping the entire specification - being careful to remember which part to quote, or inserting a discreet place-holder!