notacat

If someone wants to say that these companies will turn on this attestation for passkeys in the future, and break a ton of logins and decrease adoption, then they should have a reason why they haven't done so for TOTP.

Didn’t you already answer this by saying they want to increase adoption? That seems like the reason. I think the argument here is the same as what they do with something like streaming (which is closer to what I have a problem with, rather than locking people to specific software). They work on adoption until the numbers and ease of use are high enough to kill the other options and prevent multiple people from logging into one account. They lose some people, but gain more because of the new restrictions forcing people to have their own account.

Doesn’t necessarily work the same in that sense, but it’s still a numbers game. We continuously see companies/governments postpone onerous policies until they have enough people willing to put up with it. Then they ram it through and ignore the people that complain. It’s age gating and digital only purchases and digital id and backdoors and everything else we see with tech.

Here’s what I don’t get. When I posted this, you were posting every 10 minutes at most defending passkeys. How do you have so much energy and time to defend them so vehemently? Are you heavily invested in a passkey business? Are you an LLM that’s been instructed to defend LLMs at all costs?

I’m not sure the latter is possible since you wrote a large paragraph starting with “it’s easy to say passwords are sufficient” when that has absolutely nothing to do with my opinion on passwords. I suspect an LLM would’ve stuck a little closer to my own words.

FWIW, passwords were never "yours", they are PSK (Pre-Shared Key) with a service. Maybe you invented the credential, but it's not yours. You have historically enjoyed being able to bulk export credentials, and if that property is important to you, then you should be using transferable passkeys. Passkeys have a well-defined transferable format -- if they are the type that can be exported.

This is the equivalent of Sony arguing that you never owned any games, you owned a license. Congrats. You’re the best kind of correct - technically correct.

There is no flag on a password that determines if it is transferable. There is no amount of “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” that will work out in your favor if you’re not in the majority. If you give corporations the power to limit consumption while increasing prices, they will eventually use it. Especially if they provide a product you can’t get anywhere else (and this is their goal for every product - even if they have to buy other companies to do it - even if they have to collude to offer the same service). It’s the foundation of our entire economic system.

I need to dig out my Nightmares & Dreamscapes dvds. I think I liked those. Same with Storm of the Century.

You did well. You forgot about the son. Just like he did.