The 'I hate passwords' guide

The 'I hate passwords' guide
by Dennis O'Reilly

Until a safer, saner alternative is available, we're stuck with an insecure, outdated authentication technique. Here's how to make the best of a bad situation while we wait for services to get serious about verifying identities.
Passwords have joined pennies, dollar bills, "Real Housewives" television shows, and the two-party political system as things that have outlived their usefulness. If there was any doubt, I refer you to Heartbleed, a security hole that affected a huge number of Web servers and made IDs and passwords public knowledge. Heartbleed's silver lining may be the realization among the tech cognoscenti that passwords are an inherently unsafe authentication method, as Omar Al Akkad reported on The Globe and Mail site earlier this month.
 Last July, three Pomona College students initiated the Petition Against Passwords, an attempt to encourage consumers to pressure technology companies to implement more secure technologies for verifying users, as the Los Angeles Times' Paresh Dave reported. The consensus of the experts is that password alternatives aren't ready for prime time, as ComputerWeekly's Ron Condon reported in an article from December 2011. The situation may be changing -- slowly. Earlier this year Google acquired SlickLogin, a company that makes a phone-based authentication system. Greg Kumparak explains SlickLogin's sound-based technology on TechCrunch (more on the outlook for password alternatives below).
There's no doubt that we'll be relying on passwords for secure access for years to come. As our reliance on technology increases, the number of login IDs and passwords we use proliferates. If we follow the experts' advice and use a unique password for each service we access, the burden quickly becomes unreasonable: not only do we have to remember dozens of unique, hard-to-guess passwords, we have to remember which password we entered at each site, not to mention which user ID we supplied. 
Computer guru David Pogue claims there is no alternative to using a password manager such as LastPass, Roboform, or KeePass.
 
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