Talk:Make sure you have a password/Archives/2018

Welcome to 2018

• Recommendation of installing antivirus programs: Unnecessary (because of Windows Defender), costs money (if not dubiously ad-financed) and is potentially harmful. You might even end up even running a program that automatically opens all your malicious e-mail attachments with administrator privileges, something that you personally would never do. What could possibly go wrong? 1 2 3 4

• Recommendation of installing a "personal firewall" software, ironically saying that Linux has a firewall compared to Windows: Outdated. Even Windows XP had a firewall shipped. Speaking about which, ...

• ... please let's remove all references to Windows XP and service packs. If really necessary, we can have one single notice urging users to stop using Windows XP completely. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14223/windows-xp-end-of-support

• WiFi encryption comparison: Possibly outdated. Also, if the network is untrusted, it doesn't matter which encryption is used to send all your data to an adversary. Also, WEP has been officially deprecated in 2004. It might be time to stop mentioning it at all, and I doubt that anyone is still using a home router which uses WEP by default.

• We might want to consider more detail and prominence for explaining what a passphrase is, and how it can be safely created and memorized. Creating a secure "classical" password should be in the second place, if at all.

• "Avoid writing your password or username down" is potentially bad advice to people using a desktop computer in a trusted home environment. To me, it seems to be the most secure way to store extremely secure passwords in a place that can never be reached by viruses. If the account is really being abused by a family member, a) you personally know the person you can make liable for the damages, and b) you might already have much more severe problems than the security of your Wikipedia account.

• Using a VPN is not necessary anymore, with HTTPS becoming the default on the Internet. It is much more important (and free!) to actually care about security warnings shown by the browser.

ToBeFree (talk) 23:25, 5 May 2018 (UTC), updated 00:37, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

• Agree on second to last point. If ne'erdowells are prepared to commit felonies such as home invasion to find your password and get into your account, you are doing something illegal on Wikipedia and need to rethink your life. enL3X1 ¡‹delayed reaction›¡ 01:20, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
• a brief hint of the maximum examined tokens from the passphrase would be helpful. Especially for generated passwords. --Mdarge (talk) 19:57, 27 March 2019 (UTC)