While I'm not _happy_ about the messaging changes, those alone are not enough to do more than start paying closer attention. I highly, highly doubt that vault export would be the first meaningful feature change, and so I think there will be stronger signals of actual issues before then.
As I understand it, so far the only actual change is an announced increase in prices. Obviously, from the consumer perspective, cheaper is better, but this is a product where I think that a subscription plan makes sense (and the free tier, for now, still exists), and so I'm not going to get mad about price changes. Competitors exist and one doesn't think the new price is worth it, then switch to one of them (using the very-much-still-available vault export).
I don't think the warning is crazy or anything, but in my personal opinion it's a little stronger/earlier than is warranted and the current appropriate response is careful watching.
I hear you, but I feel like it's a better safe than sorry situation. Exporting your passwords takes two seconds. I think you can export to an encrypted file, but I just did a plain-text json file and gpg'd it. Can't hurt to play it safe.
There have been plenty of cases like this over time too. Company makes controversial change. Company rolls it back after outrage. Company slowly shifts over time until they've restored what's essentially the original controversial change.
When a company tells you their intention by announcing a change, it's often a good idea to listen. Even if their PR department does some good cleanup work in the aftermath.
Yeah exactly. When a company announces some money making scheme and it gets backlash they don't think "oops that was a mistake we won't do that"; they think "oops that was a mistake - we'll have to do it in a way that gets less backlash".
Another recent example is GitHub charging for self-hosted CI. They backtracked, but they're still going to end up doing something. They kind of have to because of all the "get 10x cheaper actions runners by changing one line" people.
I had checked as soon as I found out about the news the other day and it was there. I just checked on wayback machine and you're right, it was removed for some time.
However, if they're willing to put back that claim immediately, I doubt that their intention was to drop the free plan anytime soon, but probably it was to incentivize people to use the paid plans. Enshittification must happen sooner or later afterall, but fortunately vaultwarden exists and the export feature is highly unlikely gonna be removed immediately as the free plan disappears, so people could just switch to a third-party or self-hosted backend as soon as that happens.
I dont think its an over reaction. It's pretty common to lock in users by removing or imposing cost on exports. Having an export from today is a lot better than having nothing in 5 years when bitwarden disables exports
I've had the argument so many times with eng managers about how this password manager or that password manager will get hacked or get enshittified and I've been right 100% of the time.
Can you name a single password vault that has removed the ability to export, I would say it is a bit of wild speculation to assume this would happen. Even more so as there seems to only be anecdotal and speculative evidence this would happen.
Between the law suits, and the brand damage, there is likely very little upside for a company entertaining this idea.
It is not an overreaction at all to them replacing the principled leader who promised things with the vulture leader whose job and job history is primarily to enshittify things and sell them off.
I need to:
- Replace the extension and login on all of my browsers on all my devices
- replace the desktop application/app on all my devices
- go through and rework all the scripts that I use to automatically pull passaords from Bitwarden using the API and hope that the replacement has a good API
Nah, I think I'll stick with and keep paying/supporting Bitwarden.
I've been recommending Bitwarden for a few years now and have also been paying a yearly sub since 2022, as I always thought 10$ was a really good value.
But with all this stuff coming out, I'm holding off on recommending it anymore; at least until everything calms down and the new value proposition is fully laid out.
Like other folks have said, I don't think it's yet time to migrate. That being said, it doesn't hurt to do an encrypted export for backup purposes, start looking at alternatives, and reach out to people I know use Bitwarden to do the same.
Agreed. I will continue using it as it currently fulfills my needs. But I’m not going to shout it at everybody I catch not using a password manager anymore. I’m just not willing to take responsibility for the changes they may make in the near future.
As an aside, since it seems like they’re trying to make money: The aforementioned enthusiasm has gotten it adopted at a workplace of mine. The experience hasn’t been good, so no recommendation here either.
Their moat was being a trusted name in FOSS and it’s a bit sad to see them going in the direction of abandoning it.
But somebody else will probably step up and build on the ruins, like vaultwarden already has. That’s the beauty of choosing FOSS in the first place.
It is absurdly easy to fire off the docker container you mean.
Because you need to back up, verify backups, monitor availability, manage updates, manage MFA, and a zillion things.
Don't get me wrong, I work in hardcore, high tech IT for 30 years and I selfhost two dozen or so of services. It is far, very far from "absurdly easy" when you start .
Sure you can run a container on your pc, and hope for the best
I’ve seen this idea so many times on HN. “Just stand up a docker container and self-host”. Or even worse: “why does anyone need GitHub - just host Bitbucket yourself”
This seems crazy to me. I have a home server and host lots of my own stuff. But a password manager is tier-0, it cannot fail me.
I need to access my accounts while I'm overseas - in fact I'm prompted for passwords far more often when I cross borders. I need my passwords at urgent moments like when I need to make a large bank transfer. I need passwords unexpectedly at all times when sessions expire or I need a new session for a device I've never logged in with.
If my home server went down for any reason at these critical moments it could be extremely bad. There are some kinds of outages I can't recover from without physically attending my server. And if I'm not very very careful there are some kinds of failures I cannot recover from at all - I have a working backup solution but so did every company that lost customer data before.
And this doesn't even touch on the security risk of hosting a database of credentials on a publicly available endpoint.
Syncthing works on Android just fine, though I'm not familiar with iOS. There also several keepass compatible clients, some support sync via cloud storage. Don't need to host anything. But I admit, for corporate shared secrets storage it is not a right tool.
That's what I'm saying, a lot of people are coping with a product they admit will need a fork.
Not only is it incurring the cost of project fragmentation, but also incurring an always online cost with overly-complicated docker solutions, when a fully offline and airgapped solution already exists.
Furthermore, staying with the same ecosystem invokes the sunken cost fallacy. But the migration from Bitwarden couldn't be simpler (just export Bitwarden json file). It's almost a form of battered woman syndrome people are inflicting on themselves when quite simply they can hop onto an already proven ecosystem that doesn't bait and switch.
I was on keepass before bitwarden. Bitwarden just solves more things for me. I am sure the keepass ecosystem improved a lot over the years but fundamentally i find vaultwarden docker to be far easier. Especially for my work and family members that i convinced to use bitwarden. If they were also in charge of the sync it wouldn't be possible.
Afaik vaultwarden and bitwarden clients are as proven as keepass.
It's entirely compatible with the clients. It also removes a lot of "rug-pull" potential, and gives you the ability to access all the nice features (ex - multi-org, multi-user, shared vaults, totp, etc...)
Honestly - part of the reason I like Bitwarden is that if they ever go full "enshittification", it's going to be relatively easy and straight-forward to just move entirely off their projects and onto open-source forks.
Cant tell if this is satire. But I'm not self hosting my passwords unless I fully understand exactly what's happening. Trusting that to an LLM without really understanding what's happening seems very risky to me.
Serious question - how come free is a requirement for a password manager? Everyone's gotta eat, including the maintainers of password managers.
Tech has generous TC, lots of high-end laptops and phones worth thousands, AI & cloud spend, and yet the only acceptable price for secrets management is $0 it seems at times.
They promised an "always free" option. People committed to the service based on that.
Many companies offer a free tier and a paid tier and are willing to incur the cost of users who will never convert. If a company doesn't actually intend to keep it "always free" they shouldn't make the promise in the first place
I think a company has to be able to change its commitment, but should not screw users at the same time. For example, if they want to remove the free plan, why not, strategy can change with context, the world is moving around the company, so then remove it for new users not existing ones and it's all good.
And, honestly, if they came out with a statement that said (effectively), "Look, we're losing money here... we just _can't_ support free going forward. Here's our plan" that would be understandable. Sometimes you have a plan/goal, and you realize later that you were wrong and things need to change. But that's not what they did.
I disagree, there is always a way to keep it free, if you care about keeping your promises. Especially in this case where the service is essentially locally encrypted json blob storage. There’s already plenty of premium functionality not included. If you have runaway costs due to abuse, just make up new limits to solve it.
Passwords are critical, losing them because you forget to pay or run out of money would be a disaster. I suspect they would still provide access in read only mode to non-paying users so it wouldn’t be a disaster if they didn’t offer a free version but I think it’s pretty easy to see why someone thinks it should always have a free offering.
It doesn’t have to be free, but it can’t be set up so they can take it away from me. I self-host Vaultwarden to get that right now. Even if they break client compatibility, I still have the web vault with access to my passwords.
As soon as a company positions themselves to hold your data hostage, assume they will. I have no problem paying, but I’m not going to pay anyone trying to trap me. That’s the goal of most of these tech companies now.
My opinion and stubbornness doesn’t matter though. Identity control is getting lobbied into government legislation everywhere. Everyone’s going to pay no matter what, probably twice; once directly, once via taxes.
For me it's not that it has to be free, but that it can't be a subscription service or cloud-hosted-only. It's why I left 1Password. I don't like trusting my password management to the whims of mercurial business decisions. It's only a matter of time until private equity smells blood in the water with this product category and starts "extracting value" through acquisitions and arbitrary price increases.
> It's only a matter of time until private equity smells blood in the water with this product category and starts "extracting value" through acquisitions and arbitrary price increases.
My advice would be… If that happens, you can worry about it then.
It seems you could lose a lot of time and sleep protecting yourself against a doomsday scenario that will probably never happen.
I pay for my email and the vault that contains all my passwords. Be smart with your money, not stingy. $10 (is it still? No idea) a year is an absolute nonfactor for most of the world.
I’ve been a paying user for years, but the free tier change announcement is a sign of the enshittification to come.
It means the old guard is moving away and potentially starting initiatives not in the best interest of the user. In the worst case scenario they will sell my data or introduce stupid changes that risk security.
It's a shell script that stores passwords in a git repository, containing one file per entry. The files are encrypted using a GPG key. Because it's just a git repository, you can synchronise it between devices using whatever infrastructure you want. I use a FOSS client for it on iOS, and there was one for Android before I got an iPhone.
I tried using pass once. I like that it follows the Unix philosophy, and I want to like it, but the fact that all of your account names are visible in the clear is a deal breaker for me.
I'm interested in this, what do you use to host the git repo? Just a private repo on something like github or your own server? How do you backup your private key?
I also use pass. Any forge you feel like is fine (I use gitlab). I backup my gpg key with `gpg —export-owner-trust` and store that backup elsewhere.
Pass has a pretty good ecosystem of plugins/other clients, as well. There are open source iOS/Android clients and browser extensions so once you’re setup the day-to-day experience is not far off from any of the popular hosted password managers.
My only real issue is the dependency on gpg, as it’s pretty long in the tooth and a hassle to operate. (If you are not comfortable using gpg, spend some time learning that before you go all-in on pass!) There’s a fork[1] which swaps gpg for age, but it hasn’t attracted enough attention to get a similar ecosystem of mobile clients/browser extensions, so it’s not a very practical choice IMHO.
It's next-to-impossible to implement pass on every device everywhere and have all the same features on each client without reimplementing all of GnuPG. It pushes a lot on to GnuPG.
God help you if you want to use the PGP applet on a Yubikey or smartcard. The pieces all exist, but wiring them all up in a mobile app is hard and the result is janky.
I run Gitea on my own server. (I didn't switch to Forgejo because it's not in the Debian repositories.) I don't have a backup of my private key... I should do that.
I have used this for almost 10 years now. It's pretty barebones but it seems like the usable lifetime of commercial password managers is 4-5 years before they get enshittified, bought, discontinued, price-jacked, or otherwise made unsuitable for use. "pass" just keeps working.
I think the caution around Bitwarden is justified; and I think it is good that the message is getting out there. I will say "while you still can" is hyperbole, and will do more to distract from the larger (correct) point about Private Equity.
So I have an admission here: I keep seeing HN stuff about these networked password managers and I don't quite understand the appeal.
Is it because everybody else is swapping between several different computers, and you need the synchronization?
I just have everything in KeepassXC, and the ciphertext is subject to the same kind of backup regime I use for other files, [edit: and also additionally] a copy kept on a USB stick in my pocket.
It’s phones, mainly. People do also have multiple other devices, yes. For me another big pro is having a realtime offsite backup and being able to survive simultaneous loss of all my devices, which is plausible in correlated scenarios like a burglary, fire, mugging, car crash, etc, but I don’t know how much others think of that one.
The people I know who use KeePass live like they’re disabled. You ask them to sign up for something and they need to schedule a half hour for it two weeks out. Ask them to use a website and they need to wait until they’re home because their biweekly manual data transfer was put off because of whatever. And if they ever drop their phone, it’s this totally unforeseeable panic they’re still recovering from two months later. I’m far from convinced it must be like this, but I’m also far from convinced that most KeePass people—or people using any other strategy—have really thought this through.
Weird. I keep my KeePass database on NextCloud, and the only difference between home and phone is that on a bad network I may need a few seconds for KeePassDX on the phone to decide to use its cached copy of the database rather than the latest one. It would probably be even smoother if I used Syncthing. I assume non-technical people ought at least be able to put their KeePass files on DropBox?
> > I assume non-technical people ought at least be able to put their KeePass files on DropBox?
> Non-technical people would not do something this complicated. They don’t even have password managers, let alone a setup like this.
Google Drive/iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox are already used by non-technical users - moreso than SaaS password managers.
> Shoot, even a lot of technical people (like me) wouldn’t bother with this. It’s why I pay for a cloud-based password manager.
What do you do for when you want to access some other type of file across devices, like notes or photos? If you have notes.txt on an FTP server, just put passwords.kdbx alongside it. If you're subscribing to some new service for each individual filetype you want to sync, with nothing for arbitrary files, that seems like considerably more hassle overall to me.
For other types of files, I have different apps: Obsidian Vaults with Syncthing, but that’s not accessible from the internet. And I like having my passwords across all my devices, updating anywhere I am.
And for me, it’s just not worth the headache (and security risk) of hosting my own password manager.
How many separate services do you have for accessing files across devices, and what do you do for filetypes outside of what they cover?
> And I like having my passwords across all my devices, updating anywhere I am.
That's how it works for me with a passwords.kdbx file on my FTP server (but any cloud storage works). Same for any filetype.
> And for me, it’s just not worth the headache (and security risk) of hosting my own password manager.
What's the security risk? If anything, it's SaaS password managers that seem to semi-regularly get hit with breaches (well, mostly LastPass).
You don't need to host anything for KeePass - just plop the file next to your notes/etc.
Headache seems greater overall if you're juggling a large number of subscriptions, particularly when they start ramping up payment or moving features you rely on to higher tiers.
> What's the security risk? If anything, it's SaaS password managers that seem to semi-regularly get hit with breaches (well, mostly LastPass).
Talk to your local security engineer :)
On a venting note, this mentality is a frustration I have with SV, because I see it a lot. They don’t know what they don’t know, and think they can just stand up businesses without understanding the domain.
Ok - I made the assumption that your (s)FTP was publicly available over the internet. (It’s safer if not, but then you don’t get the benefits of syncing from anywhere that I get.)
If your FTP is open to the internet, you are now responsible for alerting / monitoring, IPS/IDS, proper config management, routine automated patching, IP allow/blocklisting… all of these things require regular maintenance. Even if you stick it behind a VPN, you will need to patch, alert on, and configure the VPN and everything behind it as well, as VPNs can be compromised.
That’s why, unless I really wanted to spend time hardening the spit out of it, there’s no way I’m self hosting my passwords. I’m happy to just pay a password manager to handle all of that.
> you are now responsible for [...] there’s no way I’m self hosting my passwords
You don't need to host anything new or take on any patching responsibilities for anything you weren't before. I already had an FTP server, so put it on there. Wherever you already access arbitrary files across devices (you didn't answer what you do for files outside of your filetype-specific subscriptions, but I'd assume you just have iCloud or something) should work fine.
Not that there are zero reasons to use a SaaS password manager, just that I disagree Keepass is somehow insecure or prohibitively technical for regular users. The solution a lot of people already seem to gravitate towards (if not just password reuse) is "passwords.txt on Google Drive".
Multiple devices and family sharing. My wife and I share several accounts, so it's really nice that we can move them between private and shared vaults on 1Password.
I swap between my phone and my computer. Sometimes I need to get an account password on a workstation, and I can just login online rather than typing several lengthy generated passwords.
Most of the workstations I use completely block USB storage devices (but not fido2 keys!)
What would be super nice is to have USB wedge that I can just send my passwords from my phone to any computer like this https://www.inputstick.com/ (Expensive, sold out and also doesn't ship to the USA)
My KeePassXC database auto-syncs to my Nextcloud instance. Nextcloud client on PCs, Keepass2Android on my phone, and it's the same end result as Bitwarden but without the shenanigans.
Do you have a solution for auto-merging conflicting changes? Because I think that's the real difference, editing on a laptop and on a desktop before the sync can occur, can cause data-loss (for my potentially naive use of keepassxc anyway).
I've never seen this happen, because (as far as I can tell) all KeePassXC clients auto-save the file any time a change is made, and all the Nextcloud clients auto-sync as soon as the file changes. Keepass is also resilient to the underlying file changing while you have, say, the edit password dialog open.
If a conflict did happen though, newer versions of Nextcloud just keep both copies and alert you to resolve it. If I had to resolve this I'd probably try the built-in database merger first: https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_merging_data...
There are several factors at play making conflicts almost impossible:
- A central device can be immediately synced to. For Nextcloud, it could be a server, for direct synchronization that I use (Syncthing), my phone (almost always online) is the intermediate device for all.
- You are usually online when creating accounts/password, so an sync can happen directly after a change
- And finally: How often do you actually _create_ accounts rather than just read the database? And how often do you do it on two devices in quick succession?
Merge conflicts on NextCloud are terrible, but for a KeePass file, I don't think this comes up very much. My laptop syncs from Nextcloud whenever it's online, and my phone syncs whenever it opens or modifies the file. Nobody else is using my laptop or phone, and certainly not my keepass vault. I would probably have to go out of my way to use both my laptop and my phone offline and add/change passwords during that time in order to get a merge conflict.
How do you get data loss?keepassXC,DX saves a conflict copy and warns you. Anytime I've seen the warning over ~10 years it's been a non issue. Like I add an entry on PC, walk away from the 'save db' prompt for a day and then update something on my phone so I have 1 new account on both. I see the warning and so I have to hit one button to do the basic merge or whatever and it's done.
Having a password manager synced to phone, desktop, laptop, browsers is handy. I used Keepass 10 years ago but I prefer integrated experiences now, particularly since I often pull them up on mobile.
Also consider teams or multiple teams across an org sharing secrets. Flat files are a tough sell, so these apps eliminate almost all the hassle. We pay for a lot of 1Password accounts, and I couldn’t imagine rolling our own solution.
In my case it's exactly that. I have a Linux gaming workstation, a work-issued (and managed) MacOS laptop and a Google-branded (Pixel) Android phone.
Bitwarden just works in all those places and the tech was, by all accounts, rock solid. AND I can pay for it instead of trying to leech off some privacy-ambiguous free tier.
Someone else made it similar comment, so I clarified the phrasing of my original post. The main backup of allll my decades of digital junk is independent and happens elsewhere.
Even if I had a USB-stick of magical capacity and reliability, I wouldn't want to have to remember to connect and disconnect it constantly.
Syncing is a huge part, UX is another. I was using KeePass on my desktop for several years before I met my wife, and having her use it was a complete failure. She did not like the workflow. Having to open another another tool, login, search for the correct site, and copy/paste the password was too much friction. And that was when things worked.
Syncing was an utter disaster. Inevitably something would cause syncs to be delayed, and then there would be a conflict and one of our changes would be silently lost. We were constantly going to lookup a password we entered, and finding it was not there anymore, at which point I would have to dig through sync conflict backup files and manually reenter the passwords that were lost, or go through the password reset flow for the sites. It was a giant mess, and that was just with two desktops and a laptop. I was using btsync at the time but all the issues I encountered apply to any file based synchronization, like syncthing, nextcloud or dropbox. Performing whole database file synchronization is simply not the right approach for password safe.
I eventually switched over to self-hosted BitWarden with the browser plugin and it has been much smoother.
I realize the wording in my comment was a little ambiguous, but don't worry, that's in addition to my files in general. (Restic, Backblaze B2, memorized passwords/keys, regular integrity checks of remote data.)
After all, even with godlike storage-media on my keychain, it would still be susceptible to a mugger or falling down a deep hole. Until that happens, it provides redundancy and convenience, provided I can bring it to a trustworthy computer.
I used to use syncthing to solve that problem, until the developer dropped the distribution because of the Google's anti-social behavior.
But the interface of every software on a phone is so atrocious that I have never actually seen any benefit from having a password manager there that I could copy stuff from. So now I just don't have it, and haven't seen any loss yet.
That said, I store way more low-value passwords on the Firefox manager (that is synchronized) than high-value ones on the offline manager.
The last months didn't make Bitwarden look very good. On the other hand, what about the competition? Sure there's KeePassXC but that's essentially local. Bitwarden even has Send to quickly share with anyone.
I might self-host something at some point. But even choosing something seems a menial task, not to speak of setting it actually up...
Bitwarden/Vaultwarden had a good run but if someone's going to self-host Vaultwarden, I would encourage people to look into AliasVault instead. It's a complete opensource ecosystem.
I'm taking a "wait and see" approach with Bitwarden. I've been a paying customer for a while, happy with it, and hoping the leadership changes won't be too user hostile. Still, a major reason I chose Bitwarden to begin with is they have a decent "Export" button, and all of this news reminded me that my offline backup of the vault was a few months old. Regardless of their product roadmap, they could have an incident tomorrow that keeps users away from their passwords -- offline backups are a good idea.
And Vaultwarden is nice. I've used it at work, hosted it myself, and as a user of the password manager I can say it's basically indistinguishable. But I don't really pay Bitwarden for a password manager -- I pay them for a secure sync of a password manager I can share with family members who can't figure out a VPN.
I have been paying for Bitwarden (BW) premium since 2019 and earlier this year decided to move away from BW due to the password filling becoming somewhat hit-and-miss (even on a fresh install), along with taking its time to do so.
Had previously used Enpass in the past and was pleased to see how much it had improved since then. Also allows me several choices when it comes to where I store my vaults. And fills passwords quickly and efficiently in comparison to BW.
So I've migrated fully to Enpass - clients everywhere, browser plugins available, and it just works.
With this news, it now looks as though my migration was somewhat prescient.
I also use KeypassXC as a backup on USB should it ever be needed.
> I'm taking a "wait and see" approach with Bitwarden.
I won’t. The optics look bad and that alone is enough to show the leadership is either hostile to users or too inept to understand why their recent actions signal a change away from what people value in their product. If they don’t understand or care about the same things as the community / customers, there’s no reason to think they’ll make choices that continue to be a good value proposition for their customers.
The only thing that’s going to stop tech companies from pulling this crap is if a hint of private money coming in to ruin everything ends up ruining things before everyone gets to cash in. Basically, a mass exodus and bankruptcy would be the only outcome that makes the next company think twice about using the enshitiffication playbook.
We need some companies built around fair value instead of extortion and they need to be run like Steam. Steam has an unbreakable hold on gaming because they’ve never screwed their users.
I only use Vaultwarden, which to my understanding is an open source reimplementation of Bitwarden's API. I personally haven't had any issues with it, not sure if it'll eventually stop being compatible with Bitwarden's official applications however.
Just switched to KeepassXC and syncthing. Transferring keyfiles over LocalSend. This has been a great local FOSS way to keep autonomy over secrets, without even needing internet.
Thats why I use vaultwarden. I also like the fact, that vaultwarden is written in rust and does not consume a lot of resources, which is great for selfhosting.
I switched to Apple Passwords this week. Really good passkey support, 2FA support, best iOS integration. You can even share passwords with others. Sadly no first party cli support. If you only use Apple devices, it’s really solid.
I only use Apple devices myself normally, but if I'm stranded out in the middle of nowhere and have to borrow someone's Android phone or Windows box in order to connect to important stuff like my bank, I'd really rather not be out of luck. Same reason I don't self-host my vault.
The only thing it's missing for me is secure notes for me to store my 2FA recovery codes in. So I mainly use Apple Passwords now, but still keep Bitwarden going for secure notes.
I wish companies that offer such a core technology and what not were at times entered into a public trust, similar to how some public lands are managed, that would protect them from private equity takeovers; I know it defeats the purpose of the companies in the first place (making money), and it probably would backfire in myriad worse ways than the problems it might solve... But I do think there are many options for how products, services and what not can be structured that give the people who maintain them what they need to thrive; without mining the users for money.
Overly idealistic thinking, maybe... but still thinking.
Public management exists for natural monopolies where no market competition is feasible. The role of the public entities is to protect competition. In this case that would be mandating import/export interoperability.
Third-party password management as an isolated paid service (i.e. you don't get password management unless you pay specifically for the password management) is just a terribly bad idea all around.
A bad idea for you. My non-technical family members can barely use 1Password and it is the easiest of the lot. The idea you promote is just not realistic.
The inverse also doesn’t mean convenience is a bad idea, just happens 1Password has a strong security model and is convenient.
I end up helping a lot of older people for a variety of reasons with tech - 60s to 90s, family, neighbors, coworkers.
They’re not invalids and have a right to participate in the digital world, even if security requirements have exploded.
Anchoring the trust in stuff like 1Password where we setup domains, their account info, their OTP codes means they get to go to their bookmarked site, FaceID to unlock the PW manager, get automatically logged in, and do what they need.
Being able to let them navigate this world without always having to hand over the paper secrets notebook to random helpers, or lose sheets of paper with passwords, or get caught up in tracking down an SMS code is better for them. Their password manager with the autofill helps somewhat deter phishing links since relying on autofill usually signals something is off, and they call someone they trust.
My point, I guess, was that convenience is basic access for some subset of vulnerable groups of people.
When people had to rotate passwords every month and choose a new one according to insane complex rules and dictionary tests, well, that was not convenient. You would probably say it's good.
Reality: people started writing their passwords on sticky notes by their computer. Possibly the worst outcome.
Why the worst outcome, though? "Sticky notes" are absolutely superior to third-party password managers in regard to "attackers."
Third-party password managers INCREASE your threat surface by orders of magnitude more than sticky notes, period. They change the number of holders of secrets from two to three, and that third one is now a juicy target. This is not theory, this has happened frequently.
Sticky notes (even better, a little private physical notebook) keep this limited to your physical location which is much easier to secure; the grandmas and grandpas I know who do this (I do similar) have a far better track record than anything else.
Its a catch 22, with password requirements getting crazy its hard to remember them. At the same time storing the passwords with a password manager means you are entrusting them for your identity. For the first party sites the passwords are hashed, however for these password manager sites they are at the most encrypted with the encryption keys that the third party already has. This essentially means a rouge password manager or rouge individual in password manager service can run away with your plaintext passwords on scale
Vaultwarden is a very lean implementation of Bitwarden but if you want to look into an alternative to the Bitwarden ecosystem, I recommend - AliasVault https://github.com/aliasvault/aliasvault - check it out!
Probably because there is no need to fork until you have to. Why do it prematurely and have to keep it up to date when you can just do it when it is needed?
Sometimes I think when a startup announces that they are being acquired their competitors have a meeting that morning and announce that they're going to start dialing for dollars. Since acquisitions almost always hurt customers I wonder if we can start creating "poison pills" that deter them.
The great thing about Bitwarden is its ability to sync passwords between multiple devices seamlessly. KeePassXC is the next move here, and I'd like to know how people made syncing work, especially for iPhone users.
Honestly after years of resistance I've finally partially embraced Apple's solution and have to admit it works great. I love that Hide My Email is integrated into it so well too
Vaultwarden looks neat:
> Lightweight, self-hosted server written in Rust, fully compatible with Bitwarden clients, implements the Bitwarden server API, supports organizations, attachments, web interface, website icon API, YubiKey, Duo, and multiple two-factor authentication options.
Ultimately, you have to store the file somewhere and sync it to all the places you want it. The magic here is that it decouples the "password manager" and the "file syncer" so you can (and should) use whatever you're already using. Greenfield, Nextcloud is the cleanest if you want FOSS and self-hosting (and they have clients for basically every platform under the sun), otherwise pick your poison between google drive, dropbox, icloud, onedrive, etc.
My old company switched through 4 different managers in the span of 3 months. They switched to LastPass just before all the seemingly endless breaches started. I think they were willing to weather it at first but things just got worse and worse. I think they also ended up with Bitwarden
vim has an encryption feature (:help encryption). With some AutoCommands, keeping your own encrypted password list becomes painless. On other platforms (phone), enter your 12 or so passwords once and let them store them.
WOW. Quietly editing the 4-year-old blog post is super slimy, holy crap. Also seems like since this story was published, they edited the 4-year-old blog post again. The story points out
>But the explanatory paragraph at the bottom of the same post still says the old ones: Inclusion and Transparency. Crandell’s name is still on it. The post now contradicts itself, and nobody wrote a new one.
Looking at the post right now, they've corrected it to Innovation and Trust.
The original creator of Bitwarden still works there as a CTO. I am curious whether he has any failsafes/poison pills in his contract when he took VC money that allows him to fork the product and start over in the event that they decide they want to lock everything down.
Or did he sign all of those rights away when he took the $100M "fuck you" VC funding in 2022.
There would be nothing preventing him in the source license, but I'm saying he may be prevented as part of the contract he signed when he sold the company.
I think this is a little hyperbolic. The product may drop features, increase prices, and squeeze its free tier users. Everything enshittifies. But the idea that password export might disappear or be degraded? Nah. You'll be able to jump ship any time you want.
Google Authenticator has an export-as-QR-code function that several other authenticator apps can parse. Is it the best/most convenient implementation? Obviously not, but you can absolutely export the codes.
Yes, there are signs of an oncoming enshitification, and these types of articles gaining traction is good because it sends a signal to the company of potential consequences....but at the same time, the evidence supporting Bitwarden enshitification is pretty weak at this point. There are degrees here, not just either/or, on/off, good/shit.
For TRUE offline password storage use "Off The Grid". A cryptographically secure paper based password generator created by Steve Gibson from he Security Now podcast.
As I understand it, so far the only actual change is an announced increase in prices. Obviously, from the consumer perspective, cheaper is better, but this is a product where I think that a subscription plan makes sense (and the free tier, for now, still exists), and so I'm not going to get mad about price changes. Competitors exist and one doesn't think the new price is worth it, then switch to one of them (using the very-much-still-available vault export).
I don't think the warning is crazy or anything, but in my personal opinion it's a little stronger/earlier than is warranted and the current appropriate response is careful watching.
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