To be fair, it's only a gawker password. As long as it's not tied to anything else, who cares?

I wish that I had used querty as my Gawker password and not the same one that I had used in fifty other places, including here.

yes, I'm a dumb lazy user

If you used "querty," you wouldn't be in the 50 most popular. Actually, I'd be amused to know how many people do use some phonetic form of qwerty or other common passwords.

And you're not dumb or lazy, you just have higher hopes for humanity at large.

yanno, I'm as dumb and lazy as the next user, but this kind of thing is exactly why I use a throwaway yahoo mail account/pw for login onto all sites/forums that require me to make an account to comment, but that I don't care to frequent (Macworld, and yes, Lifehacker are good examples of this).

It's not tied to the same email I use for the half dozen sites I actually frequent (MeFi / MeCha, FB, flickr and a couple cycling forums), and it's also not my "shopping throwaway account", which is a different throwaway mail account for stuff like Amazon, etc. Nor is it the same email account that I use for $IMPORTANT_STUFF like my main webmail account, online banking, utility bills, etcetera.

So yea, I basically have four online passwords to remember but they're distinct, strong, and not tied to the same email, rather, they're tied to function/intent. I'm hoping this is why (touch wood) I've not yet been hacked.

I picked up a tip from taz, here, a long time ago, that lets me come up with a unique pwd for every site I visit, yet I don't really have to remember much of anything. Frequently thankful for that.

The 123456 is bad, but I get more enjoyment out of 'lifehack,' 'internet,' and, for some reason, 'cheese.'

I suspect that a LOT of the 15K or so people who used the stupid passwords listed here did what lonefrontranger does.

And the Murdoch/WSJ never misses an opportunity to point out the mistakes of the "new media", and will happily lift their paywall to give them a Nelson-esque "HA HA". I must note that the page in the link had a date at the top "Thursday, December 9, 2010 As of 9:41 PM EST" (although the blog post is dated November 13th). HA HA.

flt, thanks for the thoughts but I really should know better. I've had grad level classes in computer security from employees of CERT and worked in QA testing security products. Just lazy and always afraid that I'd forget my passwords.

I've had grad level classes in computer security ... Just lazy and always afraid that I'd forget my passwords.

It's not laziness, more that human factors like "how the heck could I remember that many passwords when I seldom have cause to use them" are often overlooked by tech experts when they design systems or give out recommendations on what to do.