Just some rambling, to get started writing more regularly (hopefully). We seem to be in a new world of problematic access to all our online apps and accounts. Everything requires two (or more) forms of confirmation, typically your password, and then often a random number generated and sent to your cell phone. The most bizarre in my case is when I access my gmail, or any other Google app, the followup confirmation goes to my phone's Youtube app. When anything goes wrong, or if you don't have your phone handy (or in the case of one work colleague, one doesn't have a smart phone), it can be very difficult, especially since none of these big companies has anything like direct customer service any more, just tons of often unhelpful suggestions on their help websites. One can do google searches for help from others, but the hits you get are usually out of order, and may relate to previous versions of the various software systems one is using. Of course, this is all necessary due to the high rate of hacking and identity theft we currently face. I say necessary, but of course the alternative would be to start doing things (like banking) in person again, at an actual place in the real world. Supposedly that is less efficient and more expensive, but we may be reaching the point where it becomes more efficient again, and possibly even less expensive if the big companies end up having to make regular payouts to customers who were hacked. We're not there yet, but it could happen. I'm no expert on network theory, but from my reading on this and complexity in general, it seems that there are multiple objectives in designing systems, which are sometimes in conflict with each other. For connection and information sharing purposes, networks need to be efficient. The best way to do that is via a "hub" structure, such as that used by Fedex, and even commercial airlines these days. Instead of having routes from everywhere to everywhere, which requires a lot of routes and therefore costly infrastructure, everything (and everyone) goes from the periphery to a hub, and then out again to a different site in the periphery. Such a structure is also robust to random failures or attacks, since a failure of any particular route only affects the peripheral site involved, but not really the hub. However, hub structures are way more vulnerable to targeted failures, or even random failures that occur at the hubs. When a hub is compromised, or even just fails randomly due to equipment problems, many more sites are involved, and potentially the entire network. We saw a recent example of that, where a non-malicious event, just implementation of a buggy software update, caused worldwide outages involving Microsoft, that took days to resolve and who knows at what cost. Even at a personal level the conflict between efficiency and security is evident. The easiest way to keep our (mental) lives simple would be to use the same password for all our accounts. Of course no sane knowledgeable person would do that these days. The next best thing is to have a super secure password manager, which itself tracks all our passwords, but we only need to remember how to access the one manager (I guess that is the same as a 'keychain', although I'm not sure). Myself, I don't use such a system, I'm not sure if such a manager could be safe enough. Maybe I could use it for all non-financial, i.e. social media and work-related, access, I'll consider it. But even so, at least in my case and probably yours, various sites I use require me to change my password on some schedule, whether annually, or less, or more frequently, and these are never in sync with each other. Every time I do a password update, I would have to update the manager. It's not clear if that would end up being easier. Of course, our personal computer web browsers will offer to save our passwords for us, and I do use that functionality. However I find that this is fairly buggy, so that when I change a password, and the browser invites me to update in its memory and I do, the next time I find that it did not in fact update. Also, the browser I use (Brave) recently managed to forget all my passwords, on both my desktop and laptop computers, and when I tried to manually re-add the passwords to the software manager one by one, they kept getting deleted every time I closed the software. But since then, it seems to be slowly re-remembering most of them. Very odd behavior indeed, and no obvious way to figure out what is going on. Wishing you safe travels in cyberspace!