I installed the latest Firefox beta the other day, so I have been hunting around to find updated extensions. I finally found a version of LiveLines that would work with FF 1.5beta 1 and started playing around with the options and such. I was logged into gmail, clicked on the RSS icon and sure enough, LiveLines worked as well as it did in FF 1.06. Then I looked more closely and noticed something awfully Not Right.

Except what I saw on the screen didn’t have the username or password blocked out. And that’s not MY username. It’s someone else’s. Uh oh. I did some testing and found that the credentials did not log me into somebody’s account, which is good. But certainly that user ID and password weren’t fictional, they must’ve been valid at one point. Anyway, I reported it to Bloglines. They replied with:

Thank you for writing to Bloglines.
We appreciate that you have brought this to our attention. We have
forwarded your information to the appropriate department for further
investigation. Any Google mail feeds should, however, be displayed as
invalid, and result with a “That Blog Does Not Exist” message.
Thank you again for writing.

That’s not precisely what I would call a direct answer. Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Bloglines. I think they must be aware of this issue already, but perhaps something old was cached in there. This is definitely something to be aware of though.

• Be careful where you enter your passwords.
• Change your passwords regularly.
• Don’t use the same password for everything.
• Especially don’t use the same password for your online banking and your webmail, or much of anything else for that matter.

If you have trouble remembering passwords, use the password wallet that comes with your OS, or download one of the many free programs availale on the net that helps you keep track of passwords in a secure fashion. I recommend Keepass (windows, pocket pc) or Password Safe (windows, linux).