Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

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  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Thinker@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat is a Passkey? - Computerphile
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    1 month ago

    The number of times I’ve seen people link to this thread while completely misunderstanding the context of it drives me nuts. The issue isn’t being able to export keys, it’s that KeepassXC was making it trivial to export keys in plaintext with no user warning/verification, which fundamentally undermines the biggest security advantage of passkeys - phishing resistance. In other words, if users can be easily talked through exporting their keys via a simple in-app flow that gives them no warning about the danger of what they’re doing, then they will do that and be scammed horribly by it.

    The person who raised the issue was asking KeepasXC to come up with a better solution for exporting keys - originally he asked them to wait for the now standardized process that every passkey provider uses, but then they settled on showing the user an explicit warning about the danger of plaintext exports in the meantime.

    If you choose to read the most hostile and uncharitable subtext into every word a person writes in public, you can misunderstand what he’s saying. Otherwise, this is a pretty cut-and-dry example of a person genuinely trying to support the interests of end users.



  • How long has it been since you used Teams? I’m no apologist, I have plenty of gripes with that piece of crap software, but this seems like a crazy stretch. Teams makes it almost trivial to embed code blocks with syntax highlighting for a wide array of languages, which can be easily copied out of Teams or opened in a separate viewer for easier reading.



  • Thinker@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    7 months ago

    I agree, except that we are legally not allowed to control the software on our phones in lots of cases. Notifications, ads, upgrades, etc. are all controlled by the manufacturer and it’s illegal to override their software on the device you own.

    Add to that that specific pieces of software are becoming increasingly necessary to function in society, and you start to see that it’s not really a matter of individual choice, anymore than people shopping at walmart can be blamed for buying processed, sugary foods when that’s 90% of what walmart stocks (And all they promote), and walmart is the only affordable option in their community.


  • Congratulations, you’ve illustrated the difference between syntax and semantics. But any competent compiler also handles semantics (just in a separate phase of compilation), because that’s necessary for any useful conversion to machine code, not to mention optimizations.