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It's a lovely illusion of choice, yes. I'd personally rather see us invest time in "passwordless" systems that provide their own choices/alternatives, but in a

It's a lovely illusion of choice, yes. I'd personally rather see us invest time in "passwordless" systems that provide their own choices/alternatives, but in a collectively strong way where the weakest link in our security chains aren't bad password policies and massive password leaks from database compromises. (How many banks still require passwords that have no symbols in them because they are overly afraid of injection hacks and would rather have users use weaker passwords? How sites in general still require tiny passwords because of choices in varchar(16) that haunt them to this day, or worse COBOL tools with exact sized binary fields that still need to have those passwords in them? How many sites do we need to see added to the database of something like pwnedpasswords/haveibeenpwned before enough is enough?) I'm absolutely not saying that Microsoft's approach to "passwordless" is the best one, and certainly "national ID card" is a very scary straw-man that comes up a lot in these discussions! I am saying that we have to start from the perspective of passwords are broken for us the power users (and our lovely workaround the modern password manager) just as much as for average users that don't understand what is going on technically. We need to get rid of passwords. If we work together today we can try to build standards that get rid of passwords and still provide (especially for power users) provider choice and hardware choice and all of the little things like that which matter to us. Pretending passwords aren't broken isn't going to get us there, and is more likely to get you that future dystopia where you have no choice rather than appreciating today that passwords need to go and we should be working together on the solutions (twenty years ago) and rather than arguing to maintain the (broken) status quo, now is still a great time to explore and propose alternatives.

cryptica 5y ago
This sounds like corporate propaganda. The way I can tell is that it tries to convince people to surrender their freedom using arguments such as "What is freedom?", "There is no other option" or "Alternatives are illusions" - These narratives just try to brainwash us into a "Freedom is slavery" mindset described by Orwell.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  This would be a lot more coherant if you were able to demonstrate whatever this universally true idea of freedom is you allude to. And no, I'm not joking: what is freedom
indymike 5y ago
> It's a lovely illusion of choice, yes. It's not an illusion. There is no model where a 3rd party is involved that isn't pre-compromised, either legally (the government and civil actors via the courts), financially (stop paying, lose access), operationally (so sorry, your key expired), logistically (oh, sorry, our server is down. Can't load your keyring), or technically (um... this device thingy stopped working). Every one of these problems is really a showstopper when it comes down to it. Why? Because without perfect performance of third parties and/or hardware, the risk is your data being locked away forever (or even for a few days). We all accept some of these realities, but ultimately, I think most of us on HN have had one of the above happen to us (maybe all of the above). > How many sites do we need to see added to the database of something like pwnedpasswords/haveibeenpwned before enough is enough?) I'd love a way to get rid of the password, but the trade off is either having a third party control access to my computer or counting on flawless reliability of people and hardware. All of which can lead to a worse state than cracked: data lost forever. Ultimately, disclosures are terrible, horrible and should be prevented. But permanent loss of access is even more horrible.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  > There is no model where a 3rd party is involved that isn't pre-compromised, either legally (the government and civil actors via the courts), financially (stop paying, lose access), operationally (so sorry, your key expired), logistically (oh, sorry, our server is down. Can't load your keyring), or technically (um... this device thingy stopped working). Every one of these problems is really a showstopper when it comes down to it. Why? Because without perfect performance of third parties and/or hardware, the risk is your data being locked away forever (or even for a few days). This is what I'm saying about password managers. We *are already* in a situation where the best advice we can give each other is to get a 3rd party involved to store our passwords for us because we have to use passwords that we physically cannot remember as humans. Those same 3rd parties have the same complicated issues and responsibilities/trust legally, financially, operationally, logistically, and technically! Even how many of use Keepass or one of its forks: we accept some technical trade-offs ("It's open source!") for some massive legal ones. I tried to describe Keepass to my father and as an attorney he shivered in horror at the thought that there was no legal entity to hold accountable (through the courts if need be, through the Better Business Bureau and the court of public opinion at the very least) should things go wrong. My father wasn't wrong about that, and I've thought about that additional perspective for years now without good answers. That's also why I describe the above "choice" as an illusion of choice: our best security advice is that the safest passwords are already out of physical human memory (between minimum complexity requirements to avoid spray attacks and minimum uniqueness complexity to avoid reuse attacks) so remembering all of our passwords is just out. There are plenty of HN posts about algorithmic "passwords" that people can sort of memorize, but no algorithm can match the practical problem of the wide variety of different password policies across the web. The only real, practical option we have as a best practice is Password Managers. Which I want to make clear are already "3rd Party passwordless": and there we do have real choices right now between 3rd Party providers. I want to make it clear that just because I think passwords are broken I don't think choice is bad: I want us to understand as a group that the real fight isn't between "password managers" and "passwordless", because "password managers" are a workaround/hack towards "passwordless". The existing diversity in password managers is good, I don't know how we keep that in more "passwordless" systems, but I don't think we get there by championing for the "password" status quo. We can try to throw out the "password" bath water without throwing out the "password manager" baby, but mostly only if we start by agreeing that "passwords" are broken.

cryptica 5y ago

This sounds like corporate propaganda. The way I can tell is that it tries to convince people to surrender their freedom using arguments such as "What is freedom?", "There is no other option" or "Alternatives are illusions" - These narratives just try to brainwash us into a "Freedom is slavery" mindset described by Orwell.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago
This would be a lot more coherant if you were able to demonstrate whatever this universally true idea of freedom is you allude to. And no, I'm not joking: what is freedom

indymike 5y ago

> It's a lovely illusion of choice, yes. It's not an illusion. There is no model where a 3rd party is involved that isn't pre-compromised, either legally (the government and civil actors via the courts), financially (stop paying, lose access), operationally (so sorry, your key expired), logistically (oh, sorry, our server is down. Can't load your keyring), or technically (um... this device thingy stopped working). Every one of these problems is really a showstopper when it comes down to it. Why? Because without perfect performance of third parties and/or hardware, the risk is your data being locked away forever (or even for a few days). We all accept some of these realities, but ultimately, I think most of us on HN have had one of the above happen to us (maybe all of the above). > How many sites do we need to see added to the database of something like pwnedpasswords/haveibeenpwned before enough is enough?) I'd love a way to get rid of the password, but the trade off is either having a third party control access to my computer or counting on flawless reliability of people and hardware. All of which can lead to a worse state than cracked: data lost forever. Ultimately, disclosures are terrible, horrible and should be prevented. But permanent loss of access is even more horrible.

WorldMaker 5y ago
> There is no model where a 3rd party is involved that isn't pre-compromised, either legally (the government and civil actors via the courts), financially (stop paying, lose access), operationally (so sorry, your key expired), logistically (oh, sorry, our server is down. Can't load your keyring), or technically (um... this device thingy stopped working). Every one of these problems is really a showstopper when it comes down to it. Why? Because without perfect performance of third parties and/or hardware, the risk is your data being locked away forever (or even for a few days). This is what I'm saying about password managers. We *are already* in a situation where the best advice we can give each other is to get a 3rd party involved to store our passwords for us because we have to use passwords that we physically cannot remember as humans. Those same 3rd parties have the same complicated issues and responsibilities/trust legally, financially, operationally, logistically, and technically! Even how many of use Keepass or one of its forks: we accept some technical trade-offs ("It's open source!") for some massive legal ones. I tried to describe Keepass to my father and as an attorney he shivered in horror at the thought that there was no legal entity to hold accountable (through the courts if need be, through the Better Business Bureau and the court of public opinion at the very least) should things go wrong. My father wasn't wrong about that, and I've thought about that additional perspective for years now without good answers. That's also why I describe the above "choice" as an illusion of choice: our best security advice is that the safest passwords are already out of physical human memory (between minimum complexity requirements to avoid spray attacks and minimum uniqueness complexity to avoid reuse attacks) so remembering all of our passwords is just out. There are plenty of HN posts about algorithmic "passwords" that people can sort of memorize, but no algorithm can match the practical problem of the wide variety of different password policies across the web. The only real, practical option we have as a best practice is Password Managers. Which I want to make clear are already "3rd Party passwordless": and there we do have real choices right now between 3rd Party providers. I want to make it clear that just because I think passwords are broken I don't think choice is bad: I want us to understand as a group that the real fight isn't between "password managers" and "passwordless", because "password managers" are a workaround/hack towards "passwordless". The existing diversity in password managers is good, I don't know how we keep that in more "passwordless" systems, but I don't think we get there by championing for the "password" status quo. We can try to throw out the "password" bath water without throwing out the "password manager" baby, but mostly only if we start by agreeing that "passwords" are broken.