Yubico Forum

Upon purchasing my Yubikey, the first thing I wanted to do was to find an online site to store all my URLs/usernames/passwords. I did some research (apparently not enough) and came upon Mashedlife as what I THOUGHT was a good place to store my info. Aside from the fact that they sell cheap Yubikey knockoffs, their site still seemed to be secure, and allowed me to store my information on line, so that I could quickly share it between machines without having to worry about plugging a real USB into an unsecure machine (say, if I went to the library and utilized one of their machines for my email). My goal was to have a place to store my URLs/usernames/passwords on line.

After about 6 months of using MashedLife, and being honestly pretty satisfied with their site, and even recommending them to a few friends, I was surprised when I logged in not to see all my accounts, but to see a banner stating that "Your usage exceeded the free quota of 50 login accounts "!!! And it showed NONE of my accounts!!! I realized that if I hit the refresh screen multiple times, I can get back to my accounts, but it appears that they have an annoyance campaign targeted to make me now purchase their VIP service for $1/month.

It would have been fine if I had known up front that they were going to restrict me to 50 accounts and anything after that is a pay service, but they posted NO information whatsoever saying that I would be restricted to 50 sites (or else I wouldn't have used them in the first place). Now I'm the poor state that I've spent the time uploading over a hundred accounts to their site, and have to find another site to transfer them to (and then go through all that work again to establish accounts there, then delete them from Mashedlife).

Bottom Line: Stay away from MashedLife. Their business practices of copying other peoples technology, and annoying users into paying for what was originally a free service are indicative that they can't be trusted.

Alas, the good days that everything seems to be free on Internet is about to end?

I no longer get unlimited free news from Google News any more. Even Youtube becomes hell annoying with their intrusive ads. And soon I believe MySQL users will get calls from Oracle sales to pay for the coming upgrades. MySpace also starts to charge for previously free services when over certain quota of usage.

It is all about economy, I think. Business models are still evolving on Internet for most web services.

But I like ML says it is always $1 and will never raise the price. Finally Mashed Life made it crystal clear about their business plan.

I agree with both of you. Mashed Life service is very good, nobody can deny it is not only the first one but also the most mature service that is supporting Yubikey today. I think all of us owe ML the lesson about how to use Yubikey in a real-world application when we first received the key. Without Mashed life, honestly I can't find a convincing reason to buy 8 Yubikeys for my family and friends during the past holiday as gifts.

If ML does not charge us for their excellent service, I'll be concerned about what is their business model, selling info to marketers or what else can sustain a secure service? This is unlike a news portal that has millions of visitors per day.

Now they made it clear. So I finally pay to become their VIP membership and I'm happy with their red-carpet experience.

Seeing soooo many start-ups falling down in the past year, I think paying for quality services on the net will and should become a norm, and I'm happy to support my favorite services.

Just like you, ML is my 1st experience of using Yubikey and it is the reason we keep Yubikeys on key rings, keep using it almost every day.

We've lost patience with some individuals posting here who have apparently not read the forum rules.

In order to keep the forum clean, threads like this will from now on be deleted without prior notice.

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico