“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.”
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Logging In Was Never Supposed to Be This Complicated
The Atlantic – gift article: “Lately, the process of accessing apps and websites has grown dizzying. “I’m in password hell,” a colleague confided to me recently. “Every login attempt is playing the lottery.” The problem is not just the sheer number of digital accounts, all of which require their own password, ideally unique and unguessable (which usually also means un-memorizable).
It’s the pileup of solutions to that problem: all of the different layers of software offering to remember your passwords, the six-digit codes sent to your phone, the authenticator apps, the passkeys. Browsers and operating systems compete with third-party password managers to generate, store, and autofill your credentials. Most of my logins live in 1Password, but others are stored in Apple’s Passwords app (usually by accident), and still others were created via “single sign-on” features such as those offered by Google and Facebook.
I vaguely recall certain apps—Facebook is one—prompting me many years ago to copy down a set of “login recovery codes” that would become extremely important should I ever get locked out of my account. Whatever device I stored them on was probably wiped and sold long ago. Logins have always been a hassle. In the 1990s, forgetting your password sometimes meant mailing a postcard to your service provider and waiting a week or two for it to mail you a new password.
In the early 2010s, hackers learned to steal massive troves of logins and then reuse them on other services to steal people’s identities. Things spiraled from there; services started requiring unique, complex passwords with arbitrary requirements. These days, the user experience of logging in is “probably worse than ever,” Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert who runs the website Have I Been Pwned, told me.
“There’s just no consistency.” Password managers promised a way out, but they often don’t work as seamlessly as you might hope. I click to autofill my password somewhere, and a 1Password authorization appears, only for an iCloud Keychain authorization to pop up directly over it, preventing me from clicking on the 1Password one.
When I manually enter a login I thought I remembered, my browser prompts me to remember it; only after I hit “Save” (pro tip: Do not do this) does the website inform me that the password was not recognized. Even when you log in successfully, there’s the tedious dance of waiting for a six-digit authorization code to appear on your phone or in your email, which defeats the concept of a single password for everything. And if you’re somewhere without cell service or you’re sharing a login with someone who isn’t around, you might just be out of luck…”
