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Comment on How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hackingparent

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I know that at first look it sounds like a Pidgin problem, but they do justify their situation quite well on their site: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

this is crazy, doesn't every current linux distro already have a keychain-like-thingy which is protected by the user password? Adium (which is also based on libpurple) uses it on the mac, which means there is no plaintext password lying around.

There is - GNOME has Keyring, KDE has Wallet. But apps need to support it or have a plugin system for that. Pidgin has plugins for GNOME and Windows: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins#Securityan...

They have a point - if Google really allows other apps to access the account via Pidgin's password, perhaps they should fix that.

That is not possible with the current 2-factor authentication system. App-specific passwords are only called 'specific', they are not really app-specific, i.e. you can use them with any app you like if 2-factor authentication with a token has not been implemented yet.

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