The Top 50 Gawker Media Passwords
wiredmikey writes "Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: "123456." So is the runner-up: "password." On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media's servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords."
The idea that a password is neccessary for such an account is idiotic. No one cares about hacking it (or if you do, then you have an unhealthy obsession with TV).
Gawker is a similar timewaster. Wasting your brain power to create/remember a good password for it is foolish.
I see nothing wrong with using "123456" or "password" for it. I am also pretty sure that most intelligent people that use stupid passwords for stupid web sites, don't use stupid passwords for their bank account or their primary email (but maybe for an email they feed to spammers that offer 'deals' if you give them your email.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
One of my disposable passwords was exposed in the leak. (you can search the cracked list. my username is listed, along with a pass circa 2007)
and today after checking my lists, I realized that I used the same password on both Slashdot (frequented!) and Digg (haven't visited since v4). Whatever, I changed it on both of these sites. I didn't bother touching it on Gawker now that I know I can't trust them to actually understand password security.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
That's what OpenID delegates are for. I have a page set up that I log in to OpenID sites with, and that page contains metatags to forward to the provider of my choice. Provider goes down, I can switch internally and never change my login URL.