I don't think it's a question of fears as much as it is the pain in the ass. I can't tell you how many times I've registered to a website to use it just once for one single feature, but I assure you it's many. But yeah, I also don't want associated with them, I don't want accounts, and I don't want to put a superfluity of my information in someone else's hands. So these sorts of sites are quite nice.
At least IMO, the neat thing about these isn't a privacy thing, it's that when you don't have an identity associated with the usage of your service, you have to answer some interesting questions (data persistence? Rate limiting? Cost, or is it low enough that it can just be free for everyone anonymously? Etc) which make the solutions fun to check out
My low amount of spam is specifically because I make sure I do not give that email to just any random website. That includes this one. Some people I know get 2k per week in junk email. The ones I do get I know exactly who sold my email to someone else.
It's making me nostalgic for all of the old tools - what was another one, ``john''? Although that seems to have been modernised. https://www.openwall.com/john/
God I miss those days. And now I feel old, like the father I thought I'd never be.
Nostalgic for an age that I thought was forever. But really, never was.
My school's domain admin password was 'school' (later changed to the school's name with O->0 substitution). It's marginally better than their VNC password though, which was 'vnc' (VNC Server was installed on every machine in the school).
At my school the password was the person’s username. Someone guessed it one day. Which in hindsight was inevitable when the login screen was exposed to hundreds of bored kids every day.
The argument they're making in this longwinded post applies to most software today. Standalone licenses made sense when your life revolved around one PC saving data to its own hard drive. Today, if you want that, there are great free/DIY options.
Subscription based licensing is mostly rent-seeking.
The cloud storage, compute, and egress for a password manager is fractions of a penny per year per user.
Yes, engineering and upkeep and new features costs money. If those features are truly valuable, then the market would bear paying an additional one-time fee, just as photoshop 8 had to be better than photoshop 7 in some way to justify the purchase.*
But what new features could a mature password manager possibly have? Support for newer version of IOS and Android is the only must-have that comes to mind.
Subscriptions for expensive products that relies heavily on deals, licensing and huge cloud infrastructure like Netflix, Spotify, etc? Yeah, it's not rent-seeking.
Now, for an app that store your passwords, maybe some attachments and, since forever, allowed local vaults. Nowadays being intentionally crippled unless you adhere to this, comparatively, expensive annual subscription?
Yeah, that's totally textbook definition of rent-seeking behavior.
Having dabbled in productizing desktop software I think it's more because of API churn on modern OS's. It used to be you only need to buy once, and things work for years. Maybe a modest paid upgrade after a major OS upgrade.
Now OS's evolve continuously. Semantic versioning be damned!
This book rocked my world when I was a heady hipster in college 20 years ago. It is interesting, but also mostly belongs in the "literary" category at this point with Freud's work.
