Stuff I found in my password manager

By now it's been a while since I switched to KeePassXC. I have taken the time to clean up the mess that was my my pile of passwords. I found a few surprises. One was that a password manager can be quite a time capsule, albeit a digital one.

Something I should have expected, but didn't, was that the web changes. Sites go up and sites go down over time. I had quite a few passwords stored for sites that do not exist anymore.

Some sites have are or have become quite aggressive when it comes to authentication. Battle.net found it necessary to demand a photo ID when requesting an account deletion. As if a photo ID proves anything–they do not have any data that an ID can confirm–and sending a legal photo ID is not something I'd like to send to some internet rando.

And then there's Google. Google has locked me out of my accounts, because I don't use them all that often and because security, I guess, or that's what they claim it is.

Here are a few notes I wrote while cleaning up the pile.

Google.com

I finally deleted my passwords for several (16) Google accounts I had. Maybe still have, but Google locked me out, because they want my phone number. Care to guess what they'll never get?

Which means that all other accounts I have that are linked to these Google accounts, which is almost all of them, need some updating at the very least. Some of them try to be nice and send confirmation links to these Google accounts so they can be sure I'm me after I succesfully logged in.

I'm feel like I'm officially de-Googled now.

A super strong password

I'm not going to disclose which account where, but I found an entry for which my password litterally was `pass1234`. And a modem I used to have had `wireless` for a password. Kids, don't be stupid, don't do as I did...

Message in a bottle?

I found an entry, and I have no clue for why it's in my password manager, it had no details at all, except for a note that said:

grep -e "mail.account" \
    -e "mail.identity" \
    -e "mail.server" \
    -e "mail.smtpserver" \
    prefs.js > tb_accts.txt

I guess I wanted to make sure I knew how to extract my email accounts from a Thunderbird preferences file. But why store it in a password manager?

Real time Windows

I found a note about a Windows registry key. It looks like it makes Windows recognize the hardware clock as UTC instead of local time. Useful if you're dual-booting. I don't remember doing that a whole lot, but I probably have a few times.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
     "RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

Other notes

For some reason I also found entries that did not have a username or password, but did have information in a note instead. I have no idea how or why those were in my password manager.

An empty bitcoin wallet

I never really did anything with bitcoin, but I did create a wallet back in the day. I found it back and it has a balance of exactly 0 BTC. Oh, well...

Several websites on localhost

Apparently I have run several things on localhost, such as phpmyadmin, a wiki and tt-rss. I barely recall using tt-rss (Tiny Tiny RSS) for maybe a few days.

A folder with a descriptive name

I found a bunch of entries in a folder/group called 'Accounts'. I guess you can't be sure enough credentials are related to accounts.

Empty groups

Even if you don't have any credentials for certain things, that doesn't mean you can't have a folder for those non-existant entries.

Not a necrobump?

I logged into a forum I have last visited in December 2016. That forum didn't have any new posts since May 2021. I can't delete my account, that functionality is not built-in. I guess I'll just quietly forget that I ever had credentials for that one.

A connection to a grift that keeps on grifting

Long before the grift was known to be a grift, I was once interested in an upcoming game called Chronicles of Elyria. I remember the studio being so new at the time, they didn't even have a name. That was back in 2015. (No, they didn't take any money from me, in case you were wondering.)

Fond memories...

... of games I used to play. Most of them were sunset years ago.