On 29Mar2019 14:17, derek martin <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 08:42:33AM +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
You can sign up to github without any other obligations; it is free
and gets you various useful facilities.
[...]
There isn't actually any particular downside.
Sure there is. It's yet another account to maintain/protect which
probably find itself compromised at some point.
Well, this is one reason why I use unique random passwords for every
such service, and also why I tend not to use the "login with
google/facebook(ewww)/github/etc" buttons on offer.
Sure, there are tools
to manage all these accounts, but it's still not free, and frankly I
already have too many accounts for things that I don't really want.
I have many such, including some I don't really want.
If
you ever lose access to the e-mail address/domain you're using for all
these things, updating them all will be a giant pain in the ass, and
there's no tool for that.
Hahahahaha. I know that pain.
My longstanding email address of [email protected], which I had for decades
and continued to pay my former dial up ISP AU$9 every 3 months for to
have stable email continuity, was withdrawn a year or so ago.
When I took out the account they promised "an email address forever",
and the domain was succinct and their service (dial up ISP) good. And
they stayed true to their word, grandfathering my account indefinitely
long after the dialup side of things was not just obsolete but removed.
They have since been bought a few times, and their buyers continued to
keep the faith.
Until they were bought by Telstra (local Oz big ISP/mobile
network/behemoth). Who decided they couldn't be arsed.
I was given several months of notification, but they announced they were
shutting down zip.com.au. But, of course, not releasing the domain for
use/service by others. I actually spoke to some of the zip support staff
during the ordeal and they were nearly as unhappy as I was (still
employed, but unhappy about the management decision to drop zip).
Now I self host as Cameron Simpson <[email protected]>.
So I spent literally months going to many many accounts updating my
contact info. A few were unupdatable. And I still missed some, including
the account operating the electronic tag system we use for toll roads in
Sydney, resulting in some missed notifications and late/unpaid fines
(notification by post).
As an aside: I found it very useful to write a mail filtering rule which
copied all email to my old address to an additional special folder, so
that I could easily monitor for things I'd missed.
I went after bank accounts (and the like) and mailing lists proactively,
and the web sites of services I used regularly such as
bitbucket/github/gitlab. A lot of the rest I went after by monitoring
for old zip email arrival.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <[email protected]>
