YouTube once did a genius and really nice move: Paying the video authors. They realized that treating the people who create the works – that are the entire reason why people use the platform – well and creating an incentive for that work is smart and a good way to grow the platform.
But that time is long gone. YouTube is the monopoly in the market now. They ruin everything that was good about YouTube. They brought the adpocolypse and only pay video authors for videos the content of which they deem friendly to their advertisements business and easy to sell to advertisers based on a completely arbitrary broken automatic system that enforces self censorship on the video authors. All other videos that are still vital to the platform do not get any of the money they make of the viewers the demonetized videos keep on the platform.
They started putting ads on videos that the author did not choose to monetize completely breaking with their system of sharing their revenue with the people who create the basis for that.
While they impose strict arbitrary self censorship on the video authors who want a cut of the revenue their videos allowed to generate they allow a flood of scams and other illegitimate and inappropriate content for advertisers.
They removed the dislike button making the platform much worse for the users just to appeal to advertisers even more.
Never rely on any cloud service! A good cloud based password manager is end to end encrypted meaning the password manager provider cannot access your passwords and they are secured from the provider and any compromise of the provider. But you do not only need confidentiality but also reliability. The cloud is just someone else's computer that you store your data on. They can cease their service or stop providing you access to it at any time. Always have a local backup of anything important saved in a cloud.
With Bitwarden for example you can export your vault as unencrypted json and csv format. Those are widely compatible and allow you to easily access and import your passwords.
Do not save your exported passwords unencrypted. I strongly recommend creating a dedicated VeraCrypt or LUKS container or similar and saving the export directly into that without saving it to disk unencrypted in the first place.
Note that shared organizations are not included in the standard vault export and need to be exported separately.
Edit: Someone mentioned that Bitwarden's export feature does not export attachments. So export them manually if you need to.
Just because software is open source does not mean someone is actually looking at the code. But depending on the software there are incentives to do so. Some people might be technologically interested on the way a software does something and look at the source code for that. Some people might want to check the benignity for themselves and actively check the source code for malicious features. With community maintained software there are often many different independent people working on the software. Also many open source software projects allow code commits to the software. Many eyes on the software due to many people working on it increases the chance of malicious features or vulnerabilities being discovered. A great thing about FOSS is the possibility to fork it or to use the FOS software of someone else in your software. FOSS allows and even encourages everyone to work with the software of others for ones own purpose and to modify, adapt or embed it. This leads to more people having an eye on the source code just for purely practical purposes. Open source just means publishing the source code, but FOSS is about actively reusing, improving and adapting other people's work in your own work. Security researchers might also have a look on open source software purely for their own research. Another great important aspect are bug bounties. Many developers pay bounties to people who report vulnerabilities to them. That creates an incentive to audit the code. But obviously not every project, especially smaller ones, have bug bounty programs. But you could probably sponsor one for some software you like.
Lastly there are independent third party audits. Those can be done for a number of reasons. There can be community paid audits through donations. VeraCrypt had one for example. Then there might also be other organizations who want to use the software and have an interest in its security. VeraCrypt is also an example for that. The German government paid the Frauenhofer Institute for an audit of VeraCrypt.
In the end it comes down to the specific software. If someone implements a malicious feature in their software it is not necessarily going to be found just because the source code is open. If you find some random unknown software it is not secure just for being open source, but the chance of malicious features or vulnerabilities being discovered is definitely higher if it is possible to look for them in the first place.
Security critical software should be open source *and* audited.
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
You might have old accounts especially cloud accounts that are just idling abandoned while still holding personal information. They might have old weak passwords just waiting to get compromised. Same goes for old email addresses that you do not use anymore but are still linked to other accounts. This is a reminder to check those, delete your data from them or to delete them altogether (delete private information manually first before deleting the account as many companies do not actually delete the data from deleted accounts and just mark the account as deleted).
Some examples of this could be:
* old Google accounts from old devices
* old iCloud accounts
* old Microsoft accounts
* old Aol or similar email accounts
* old accounts from smartphone vendors like Samsung, Huawei etc. that often have their own cloud services
Make sure to set a strong passwords on accounts you want to keep and of course use a password manager. Besides the security password managers have the great side effect of giving you an overview over all your accounts so that you cannot just forget old ones.
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
YouTube once did a genius and really nice move: Paying the video authors. They realized that treating the people who create the works – that are the entire reason why people use the platform – well and creating an incentive for that work is smart and a good way to grow the platform.
But that time is long gone. YouTube is the monopoly in the market now. They ruin everything that was good about YouTube. They brought the adpocolypse and only pay video authors for videos the content of which they deem friendly to their advertisements business and easy to sell to advertisers based on a completely arbitrary broken automatic system that enforces self censorship on the video authors. All other videos that are still vital to the platform do not get any of the money they make of the viewers the demonetized videos keep on the platform.
They started putting ads on videos that the author did not choose to monetize completely breaking with their system of sharing their revenue with the people who create the basis for that.
While they impose strict arbitrary self censorship on the video authors who want a cut of the revenue their videos allowed to generate they allow a flood of scams and other illegitimate and inappropriate content for advertisers.
They removed the dislike button making the platform much worse for the users just to appeal to advertisers even more.