Skip to main content

LastPass - Fare thee well but I could not forgive the back stabbing

Yesterday, I bid farewell to the LastPass Password manager with whom I had a long association. A little over 10 years ago, I saw the writing on the wall and realized that I needed help with password management and nervously signed up with this new and up-and-coming password manager called LastPass. To encourage more users, LastPass offered a 5-year deal for $60. I signed up for this deal and was pleasantly surprised by what the tool could do. As it is with a lot of startups, the energy levels are high when starting out and new releases brought new functionality regularly. But that pace dropped off precipitously and in the last few years, they sort of sat on their laurels and the tool became passe and dated. 

To compound their problems, a series of hacks last year exposed their basic claim of security for your passwords. Unknown hackers managed to clone several password databases and then using state-of-the-art computers, they managed to crack user master passwords even those that were 10 or 12 characters long. How many of us have passwords that are that long? I do not blame them for being hacked - it happens to the best of us. What bothered me was their response. At first, they hid the hacking attempts and when they were forced to announce it, their press releases made it sound like it was the customer's fault for having weak passwords etc. Even after it was decisively proven that they had several issues with how they stored those passwords, the CEO never made an attempt to apologize to his customers. 

Anyway, I thought moving on from LastPass would be difficult but to my pleasant surprise, 1Password made this transition seamless. I was blown away by how smoothly I was able to shift my entire password database to 1Password. Even the user experience in the browser/desktop/mobile was nicer compared to LastPass. It reinforced a concept that is well-known in the Bay Area. In order to grow, change is a necessity. It applies to everything from software development to job advancement. Keep innovating by changing your environment with a constant focus on quality. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Om Shanti Om ...

Wow - It is Nov 17th already and it has been 16 days since my last post ... what hectic lives we lead - no wonder we all sooner or later succumb to some stress related disorder. But morbid thoughts aside, here is my "detailed" Om Shanti Om experience. Kutti (those on a need to know basis know who I am referring to) and wife called us to go catch the Om Shanti Om flick at my brother's deserted theater - (begin footnote) it appears some of the local mainstream cinema halls have stumbled on the fact that screening Bollywood movies is a sure way of generating copious quantities of moolah given the zillion or so well-heeled fanatic Bollywood fans in the bay area but this is a topic best left for another blog (end footnote). Anyway, the rotund and 24 weeks pregnant mrs and I made our way to the "deserted" theatre 10 minutes before the agreed upon time. Turns out that the zillion fanatic Bollywood fans also decide that this was the movie to see on a Friday night at ou...
4 comments
Read more

Baby names - trials and tribulations ...

A certain world traveling friend of mine requested my thoughts on pre and post fatherhood. Since I am still in the pre-fatherhood phase, I shall enlighten my friend with some words of wisdom as someone who is actively making all the wrong choices and the right mistakes :) Choosing baby names can be an interesting experience. First time parents-to-be like yours truly and the wonderfully rotund mrs are often perplexed with the myriad choices for baby names. Now throw in the rigors of Indian names and you are looking at several zillion permutations and combinations that is likely to cause the parents-to-be run screaming for the exits. Thanks to my mother, I am blessed with a _long_ name. While it does inconvenience me from time to time, I have always looked upon my long name as a blessing since it pretty much guaranteed that I will never suffer from identity theft or fraud. One look at my name and most people just give up :). So given that the baby will have at least one long name (the f...
4 comments
Read more

An ode to the chicken dish ...

It is a sleepy Sunday morning here in the bay area. The mrs is watching an assortment of cooking shows on HGTV that is making my mouth water for the glorious chicken. Of course, it doesn't help that next week is Thanksgiving and all the cooking shows are showing how to cook that perfect succulent bird (turkey or Cornish game hen or the regular full chicken). I had to swear off eating meat (chicken being the only meat that I would have liked to consume) as one of the preconditions for marriage with the mrs :). She feels quite strongly about this and so I have had to make the ultimate sacrifice and give up eating chicken. If I was a member of AA, I would have been given a platinum medal because it has been approximately 5 years since I last consumed a good chicken dish. Looking back through my life, I guess my infatuation with the chicken really started in boarding school when week after week, while most children enjoyed special Sunday lunch meals (which usually was different succ...
3 comments
Read more