I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn't use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.

Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.

Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn't install any software on them that wasn't on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.

I didn't get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they've been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can't reuse passwords, can't write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.

Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it's been wonderful.

I don't know why the military doesn't get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they've been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I'd forget them (and again, we weren't allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don't even need to remember it. I love it!

I store my master password on a sticky note attached to the bottom of my desktop's power supply. Easily accessible if I were to die, but sufficiently secure that if it were physically compromised I would have significantly worse problems on my hands.

I’m not in IT but I followed the Michael Bazzell podcast until he disappeared. Guy was a bit paranoid but there was great info there. My understanding was browser saving passwords isn’t secure, that those passwords are open to scraping from bad players. Ofc I can’t reference this because the entire body of over 300 podcasts disappeared with him.

Agree on Bitwarden and such.

Using Proton Pass was a game changer to me , I don't have to ignore the necessity to put a strong and complicated password for security reasons anymore, Proton generate it to me and stores everything ( so I don't need to remember which password I set for which account ) But the bad aspects of cloud services worry me a little about this: the possibility of a security breach of the service, or the possibility of not being able to access it for any reason is a real disaster if it happens... so I'm thinking of exporting my passwords to another safe place for such cases.

I've been using Firefox's built in password store, plus 2fa for sensitive accounts when possible. Are there any known issues? Uploading all my passwords to someone else's server sounds silly.

I always recommend Proton Pass. A) because they have a forever free version and B) because hopefully they start looking into the whole suite in general and even if they don't subscribe, they are more aware afterwards (hopefully).

My password manager is

mkdir ~/Account/some.domain
cd $_
genpasswd | openssl some-cipher -k 'really strong encryption password' >pass.enc
echo username >login

#decrypt
cd ~/Account/some.domain
openssl some-cipher -d <pass.enc | xclip
#paste in field
xclip login
#paste in field

Couldn't be easier, couldn't be safer.

One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn't tell you password requirements after you create your account,

To be fair, that is super fucking annoying. I hate when I tell bitwarden to save my password only to have the site come back with it being too long and only some special characters are allowed.

I migrated from Bitwarden to Proton Pass (mostly due to their OTP integrations) and I am enjoying it very much. They are constantly improving it, which is also a plus.

@Charger8232 I have been using Vaultwarden (Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust) selfhosted for a few years now, and I have to say I'm very happy with it. I also use the backup strategy, on some media (USB stick and SSD) encrypted with Veracrypt.

In my experience preaching this same thing to many users at work and just personal friends, they won't change their ways. Because "omg not another password to remember" and "that's too much work to login just to get a password".

I've just stopped trying to educate people at this point. That's on them when their info gets leaked or accounts drained.

You are right. However most of the mainstream YouTubers promote rubbish password managers, which is why most people I know don't know about bitwarden. I usually recommend bitwarden or proton pass. (I'm self-hosting vaultwarden). More privacy focus YouTubers need to promote bitwarden, keepassxc etc. (I'm waiting for proton pass self-hosting option).

Absolutely this. Been using KeePassDX for years and its made my life so much easier. I am waiting for it to support passkeys so i can start using them where possible.