dusty.ninja

RE: https://beige.party/@LoganFive/115430643389017086

Hey Everyone,
This is just a reminder that Friday is International #ButtholeDay. Don't forget to celebrate in whatever manner brings joy to your heart.

you know, I was planning to return the Neo after writing this blog post but I never did. I'm typing on it right now. I have a machine with 6x the memory in the other room but I just adore this anemic lil doodad 🥺 https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

i think you'll all be well pleased with #GoToSocial v0.23.0 when it comes out, imagine working search... after all these years... 🧓

Quite a few people have sent me the "Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them." post on Substack.

The post recommends people abandon passkeys and stick to passwords + TOTP, citing what appears to be concerns with attestation as the primary reason.

I’ve written a rebuttal as this is really dangerous advice and it's based on some incorrect technical claims.

https://scotthelme.co.uk/passkeys-are-not-a-trap/

it does not justify the other things but credit where credit is due: america has come really far in gas station pizza technology

This isn’t the post you were looking for. It’s not funny, interesting, or artistic. It’s not a distraction from what’s going on in the world, or your world, or an exploration of worlds. It doesn’t rhyme or promote ideologies or talk about cats. There is no technical jargon and it was not written using Linux. There is no picture or alt text or text about alt text. This post isn’t even here.

If you actually read the “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.” post going around, you’ll find a transparent attempt to clumsily string together a conspiracy.

The post is predicated on the idea that a feature of WebAuthn called “attestation”, which is only used in high-assurance and usually corporate scenarios, and usually with physical hardware security keys, will be leveraged to hurt people, somehow.

The post posits that a website like X will bait and switch users: first, you get a passkey. Then, later, scary “attested” passkeys! This simply isn’t possible to do because attestation isn’t supported on the web for mass market, consumer authentication.

Attestation for passkeys (software-based, syncable credentials) is antithetical to their mass market goals, and would freeze out independent, non-corporate-backed credential managers. It’s an explicit non-goal of the designers of passkeys, who work together in a forum anyone can join.

And trust me, websites and apps like banks repeatedly asked for attestation at the beginning of the industry’s passkey journey. The platforms, browsers, and credential management apps have held firm that the goal of passkeys is reducing phishing and **not** some kind of trusted computing scheme. (And I will note: over my dead body!)

Besides the theory of the case being fundamentally wrong, there are several things that make the post disqualifying in terms of arguing something useful or important in the realm of security, privacy, and user authentication:

1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!)

2. Describing TOTP as a “great solution” for adding security to a password-based account. When the most common threat model on the web is phishing (a word the post never mentions!), TOTP hardly buys you _anything_. TOTP is phishable.

3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed.

There are bad things happening in tech and untrustworthy people and companies do exist, but they’re largely in the AI space, not the “let’s stop people we love from getting compromised through phishing” space.

Somewhere out there is the GOAT who designed the classic iOS 6 Passbook shredding animation. I hope they are having a great day. ✨

I hate being able to see in fluently animated graphs and pictures who is profiting off of genocide, as it prevents me from being able to say that I didn't know what was going on later, but I also don't want to gatekeep this incredible site from you:

https://bl00d.money/

Protip:

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."

The red-lipped batfish or Galápagos batfish (Ogcocephalus darwini) is a fish of unusual morphology found around the Galápagos Islands at depths of 3 to 76 m (10 to 249 ft).

(No, it’s not AI. Triple checked)