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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Agree that passkeys are the direction we seem to be headed, much to my chagrin.

    I agree with the technical advantages. Where passkeys make me uneasy is when considering their disadvantages, which I see primarily as:

    • Lack of user support for disaster recovery - let’s say you have a single smartphone with your passkeys and it falls off a bridge. You’d like to replace it but you can’t access any of your accounts because your passkey is tied to your phone. Now you’re basically locked out of the internet until you’re able to set up a new phone and sufficiently validate your identity with your identity provider and get a new passkey.
    • Consolidating access to one’s digital life to a small subset of identity providers. Most users will probably allow Apple/Google/etc to become the single gatekeeper to their digital identity. I know this isn’t a requirement of the technology, but I’ve interacted with users for long enough to see where this is headed. What’s the recourse for when someone uses social engineering to reset your passkey and an attacker is then able to fully assume your identity across a wide array of sites?
    • What does liability look like if your identity provider is coerced into sharing your passkey? In the past this would only provide access to a single account, but with passkeys it could open the door to a collection of your personal info.

    There’s no silver bullet for the authentication problem, and I don’t think the passkey is an exception. What the passkey does provide is relief from credential stuffing, and I’m certain that consumer-facing websites see that as a massive advantage so I expect that eventually passwords will be relegated to the tomes of history, though it will likely be quite a slow process.



  • What an absolute failure of the legal system to understand the issue at hand and appropriately assign liability.

    Here’s an article with more context, but tl;dr the “hackers” used credential stuffing, meaning that they used username and password combos that were breached from other sites. The users were reusing weak password combinations and 23andme only had visibility into legitimate login attempts with accurate username and password combos.

    Arguably 23andme should not have built out their internal data sharing service quite so broadly, but presumably many users are looking to find long lost relatives, so I understand the rationale for it.

    Thus continues the long, sorrowful, swan song of the password.






  • Respectfully, you were the one who pointed out the impact of the Network Effect.

    The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users’ motivation for using the product (marginal effect).

    Thus, users don’t need to understand the credentials of the platform if the network effect is strong enough, but as users leave the network, the value (credentials) of the platform as a whole decreases.

    Another way to think about it is that the amount Twitter “matters” is directly related to how much we collectively agree it matters. While not directly transferable, I’d suggest that Keynes’ Animal Spirits concept can help us to understand why this might be the case - prevailing attitudes towards a platform can have a profound impact on their value.













  • I don’t know anything about your situation, and I truly don’t need details, but if you think you can’t afford access to any news outlet, I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.

    Since you’re apparently too poor to access any way to entertain or inform yourself, I’m guessing you’ve had ample time to mull over solutions to this problem, and I’m eager to learn what an ideal solution would look like from your perspective.

    Are you cool with paying for your news in exchange for your data/ads? Is there part of the editorial process we could remove to save money? Maybe we don’t need fact checkers and should just assume that journalists know what they’re talking about?

    I’m not sure how we simultaneously provide free journalism and ensure that those journalists have enough to eat themselves, but I share in your convictions that democratizing information is imperative.

    From where I sit, it seems like news organizations have moved away from showing ads for revenue to some extent, so the only option we have is to include news in our monthly budget and support journalists as much as we can.