Gawker got hacked over the weekend and had all their users' data stolen, including encrypted passwords. Awesome.
Gawker at least emailed all the people who had accounts letting them know that this happened, which is nice of them. I didn't even realize I had a Gawker account, but I do. I've changed my password there as well as my Google and Amazon passwords. I don't have any idea what password I used for Gawker but figure I should be cautious since I did use my real Gmail address for the Gawker account. All my banking stuff uses usernames and passwords I don't use anywhere else so I'm not concerned about those.
I'm thoroughly annoyed by this. Generally I don't like getting accounts at tons of websites, mostly because I don't want to remember all the logins. On my work laptop I use Password Safe so I don't have to remember any passwords or usernames, but I shouldn't have to.
OpenID isn't the answer. I don't have the ability to easily generate throw away email addresses (right now). Using Gmail's "+" option doesn't work on 90% of the sites I've tried. So far, just not having accounts is the only answer. But not having accounts is actually fairly difficult these days.
I'm thoroughly annoyed and I don't know how to fix this.
Gawker Got Hacked... I Dislike Online Accounts
Published
14 December 2010