Basically the problem is that Passkeys are designed to allow a particularly bad enshittification once everyone uses them. So it’s not about downsides of using them now, but about them being used in general and then abused.
I like the article and agree with the problem, but I’m skeptical that this works as a strategy to fix the problem. First off, individual responsibility or boycott doesn’t really work. Most people will just use what their phone gives. Second if the corporations do want to do this, they could implement it separately in their apps, like twitter or google chrome requiring quasi-attested “homebrew” passkeys stored in cryptoprocessors. Ultimately I do not think we have any power to prevent them from doing that.
The time of democracy and pluralism is over. We’re already seeing the author of the article being maligned and personally attacked for talking about AI - how dares he? On all fronts we have lost the culture war and lost power, economic power, information power like access to truth.
Yeah, but if the big company wants to embed weird shit in their client software… A frontier model can reverse engineer the client, determine what satisfied the authentication request, and replicate the implementation elsewhere on our own terms. Can do this with less than $100 worth of compute. I know because I’m already compiling/sideloading iOS apps with Xcode on my Gentoo desktop — Apple can eat shit.
Basically the problem is that Passkeys are designed to allow a particularly bad enshittification once everyone uses them. So it’s not about downsides of using them now, but about them being used in general and then abused.
I like the article and agree with the problem, but I’m skeptical that this works as a strategy to fix the problem. First off, individual responsibility or boycott doesn’t really work. Most people will just use what their phone gives. Second if the corporations do want to do this, they could implement it separately in their apps, like twitter or google chrome requiring quasi-attested “homebrew” passkeys stored in cryptoprocessors. Ultimately I do not think we have any power to prevent them from doing that.
The time of democracy and pluralism is over. We’re already seeing the author of the article being maligned and personally attacked for talking about AI - how dares he? On all fronts we have lost the culture war and lost power, economic power, information power like access to truth.
Yeah, but if the big company wants to embed weird shit in their client software… A frontier model can reverse engineer the client, determine what satisfied the authentication request, and replicate the implementation elsewhere on our own terms. Can do this with less than $100 worth of compute. I know because I’m already compiling/sideloading iOS apps with Xcode on my Gentoo desktop — Apple can eat shit.
Then this turns into yet another arms race of fixing and breaking.
Hiding stuff in client side software never stopped being an arms race between the producer and consumer. LG TVs are a great example.