I’m just not convinced that mandatory hardware attestation is actually a real problem we need to worry about.
Like, yes, people with high security jobs will have that for sure. And they should.
But large companies that want customers? They want to make it as easy as possible for their customers to connect. They’re not going to force people to have a hardware device which if damaged or lost will lose them a customer. That’s just not what they want.
And… honestly, you should probably buy 3. Losing your main key only to find out that your backup key broke a month ago and you haven’t been testing it is a real risk.
They’re actually not tied to a device. They can be synced across devices.
Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane, Google, Apple, and Microsoft will all do passkey syncing for you.
We don’t yet have a good Linux native passkey store. I believe the credentialsd project is working on a spec for that. Once that’s up and running I would expect to see some options for syncing without relying on a third party service (though, you can self-host bitwarden right now). It’s definitely not seamless on Linux yet though.
They really aren’t a trap. They’re a well designed standard. The tooling around them isn’t quite perfect yet, but they’re a huge improvement over passwords.
People upvote because they hate change.
I think people are right that the solution here isn’t to try a different project.
Instead of being confrontational about it, though, I’d recommend a different aproach.
evelyn: .lol 😜
you: I know! I know. The branding is pretty silly. But this really is the right tool for the task. Unesco and Wikimedia use it. And we can do our own branding for $50/month. 🤷
A lot can be fixed by just acknowledging people. They’re trying to evaluate something they don’t understand, and having a reaction. It’s not even unreasonable. The right thing to do is just acknowledge and move on.
Usually that’s all it takes. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed when you’re being reasonable. If they won’t move on, that’s the point where I start thinking about job applications somewhere else.
Yeah. Once you spend an afternoon debugging a failing cron job, the 5 minutes needed to write the boilerplate starts to feel pretty ok though.
I’ve never had to spend an afternoon debugging a failing systemd timer in the years since I made the switch.
It’s not. But the systemd timer has more robust logging and monitoring, and much more explicit and readable syntax.
Once you get used to systemd timers, it’s really hard to see why you wouldn’t use them if your system has systemd. Unless writing crontabs by hand makes you feel like a hacker I guess. I’m not even being totally sarcastic about that - there is a fun retro feel to cron.
GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.
The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.
EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.
I’d add that traditional search can’t reasonably hope to compete with AI in this environment. If you’re running a traditional search engine right now, there’s a real argument that the best business decision is to accelerate the enshitification to capture as much value as you can from your remaining audience while you still have it.
This is the usual cycle with these sorts of technologies - once a replacement arrives, the natural choice is to shift from growth to exploitation.
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
Memorizing passwords doesn’t scale well.
You’ve likely got dozens of accounts. You’re not going to memorize a password for every account. Re-using passwords is a serious security problem though. Poorly secured sites get their password databases leaked all the time. If you use the same password on lots of sites, it’s basically a sure thing that the hashes are out there on the darkweb already along with your email, and your password is compromised.
Also, typing your email password into an unsecured library computer is a terrible idea. It is ridiculously easy for someone to install a keylogger and gather emails and passwords. In the past, your main protection was that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to break into the computers, install keyloggers, collect lists of passwords, then figure out how to use them to get money. But with LLMs that can all be automated. It has become ridiculously cheap, and can be done by someone with a bot farm in Russia.
A password manager largely fixes the first problem, but at that point you need a device with your password manager with you to log in anyway. And the password manager doesn’t fix the second problem at all.