On: Strongbox and Aaron Swartz

[cwb71]

It is chilling—but is it true?

My immediate reaction when reading that paragraph was that someone as security-minded as Aaron would probably not leave his password saved in a Skype client.

[byerley → cwb71]

There's a difference between being security-minded and being a crypto-nut. If you're proud of the work you're doing and it's not secretive, why bother encrypting the hard-drive? Similarly, he wouldn't have been caught in the first place if he had been security-nutty about the process, but he didn't think he was doing anything immoral.

[breakyerself → cwb71]

Isn't that safer than typing it every time? A key logger could get it then. Has anyone ever extracted a password stored in a client like that?

[eli → breakyerself]

I don't know anything about Skype but yes, people have definitely extracted passwords saved in IM clients like that.

[jeffasinger → cwb71]

There's no way he would have set things up to go from boot to skype without at least one password.

[billybob255 → jeffasinger]

There's the possibility that the person knew the password to log into his computer and Skype was a startup program.