3 ms·

I have far more confidence in my ability to hang on to a single smartphone than I have in my ability to hang on to a dozen or more separate 2FA hardware tokens.

xte 8y ago
Your ability may be relevant but only to a certain extent: for instance I can restore my personal desktop with data and software from scratch quickly and easily from my multiple backups. I use NixOS so my OS will replicate autonomously, I have dotfiles managed via org-mode+stow (and trying homeManager), rsync and unison at hand. I'm pretty confident that I can survive many kind of crush quickly with enough safety. My phone however is an entirely different story: I can't backup it properly, I have to relay to obscure, proprietary and totally unreliable mechanism that prove to being able to restore only parts of my phone "operating environment" and in an unpredictable manner. What you can do with all your soft-token if your phone suddenly die? Another example in the past banks have had bankbook on paper, essentially ledgers that banks and their consumers have in hand, so both parties can prove a transaction. Now it's all on bank's servers, I can prove nothing as a consumers, I can only hope my bank do it's job well. Same if you buy shares, in the past you obtain a paper document that prove the transaction, now it's all on someone else server. You can take screenshots, perhaps have some sort of pdf receipts but they have essentially no legal value, anyone can forge them. Credit card are the same, internally they operate like paper bankbook, recording a certain number of transactions, however you have no control on that. That's the BIG point: it doesn't matter how skilled and provident you are, the systems it more and more designed in a way that you are TOTALLY powerless, no matter how many things you know and how attentive you are.
em-bee 8y ago
my hardware tokens are locked safely at home or in the company office (to manage accounts for work), and only taken out when i need them. the phone i carry always around. the risk if loss or theft is always lingering. my wife just dropped her phone. it crashed. took 5 minutes to boot, i guess a filesystem check after the crash. it could have died completely too. my previous phone stopped working because of a botched update. we had a phone stolen... there are just to many uncertainties to trust a single portable device.

xte 8y ago

Your ability may be relevant but only to a certain extent: for instance I can restore my personal desktop with data and software from scratch quickly and easily from my multiple backups. I use NixOS so my OS will replicate autonomously, I have dotfiles managed via org-mode+stow (and trying homeManager), rsync and unison at hand. I'm pretty confident that I can survive many kind of crush quickly with enough safety. My phone however is an entirely different story: I can't backup it properly, I have to relay to obscure, proprietary and totally unreliable mechanism that prove to being able to restore only parts of my phone "operating environment" and in an unpredictable manner. What you can do with all your soft-token if your phone suddenly die? Another example in the past banks have had bankbook on paper, essentially ledgers that banks and their consumers have in hand, so both parties can prove a transaction. Now it's all on bank's servers, I can prove nothing as a consumers, I can only hope my bank do it's job well. Same if you buy shares, in the past you obtain a paper document that prove the transaction, now it's all on someone else server. You can take screenshots, perhaps have some sort of pdf receipts but they have essentially no legal value, anyone can forge them. Credit card are the same, internally they operate like paper bankbook, recording a certain number of transactions, however you have no control on that. That's the BIG point: it doesn't matter how skilled and provident you are, the systems it more and more designed in a way that you are TOTALLY powerless, no matter how many things you know and how attentive you are.

em-bee 8y ago

my hardware tokens are locked safely at home or in the company office (to manage accounts for work), and only taken out when i need them. the phone i carry always around. the risk if loss or theft is always lingering. my wife just dropped her phone. it crashed. took 5 minutes to boot, i guess a filesystem check after the crash. it could have died completely too. my previous phone stopped working because of a botched update. we had a phone stolen... there are just to many uncertainties to trust a single portable device.