[X Newbies] decrypting keychains

[The Macintosh Lady]

on 8/29/2003 12:27 PM, Florin Alexander Neumann at alexn at ica.net wrote:

> On Wednesday, Aug 27, 2003, at 18:47 Canada/Eastern, TheMacintoshLady
> wrote:
> 
>> I would simply go into Keychain and NUKE the whole list....then YOU
>> choose what you want it to remember. <sigh> I hate how it tries to
>> assume.........
> 
> My opinion is that Keychain is quite nicely implemented (wasn't it
> there already in OS 9, anyway?), and it makes good sense in the OS X
> environment. My chief problem is that it doesn't allow to print a hard
> copy of the items stored therein (presumably for security reasons).

I can understand that, it's just that if you depend on one password to
unlock all, what if you forget that one? I have 100s to remember.....

> I mean no disrespect, but I think that your complaints about how OS X
> works stem to a large extent from insisting to treat it like OS 9.

It's more that I am one user with 16 computers......whereas if you are in a
school or work environment where you have one computer and 16 users, sure,
the keychain might be the thing you need. I've just never needed it.

> IMHO, in the long run you'd be more productive if you approached it on
> its own terms, keeping in mind that, under the skin, it's really a very
> different beast. (Of course, that's not how things should be. We are
> forced to adapt to the computer, rather than having computers adapt to
> us -- but that's not going to happen any time soon.)

I realize what it is underneath, but that doesn't mean I want it to do
everything for me like Windows. After all, it was touted as being more
powerful than the former OS and putting us in more control, not less.

I just wanted the person to know that nuking the items in the keychain was
safe and would bring them back to where they wanted to be, without hurting
anything. I must admit, even though this system has been hard on my new
users, for me it hasn't been a problem except to set up things to my way of
working, and since there are more choices I guess that is why it takes a bit
longer to investigate them all. I have been called intrepid because I have
machines to spare, so I can afford to nuke this and that and not worry about
the consequences. So far, no problems, as I do take time to do  research
first. I would also not advise something I hadn't tried myself......

The thing that won my heart over was, recently when my working machine was
hit by lightning it nuked the optical mouse...it caused weird problems that
made me at first think the HD was on the fritz, so I immediately transferred
3 gigs of work over to the X machine. While there I discovered the pleasure
of running the server with PHP turned on which meant people could surf and
watch the page develop on the fly, and it would also be the complete page
rendered as it would be seen on the external server.  This is rather nice
than having to upload every time you make a slight change to see what it
did, and I guess thanks to fate, I'm designing on X now. :-)








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