codalan

It sucks Yubikey (or other hardware based auth) isn't more prevalent in the financial/banking world. It helps mitigate a lot of types of attacks:

- No tokens to exfiltrate off a computer

- Avoids keylogger style attacks

- More durable than cell phones

That said, for people that have high amounts of money in certain accounts (> 1m), it might also present physical dangers (e.g. kidnapping, home invasion) for thieves attempting to get access to the hardware key.

In an ideal world, I'd just use Yubikeys for everything. The problem is that it's not universally supported (or only supports a limited number of keys), so now I have a hodgepodge of 2FA app or Yubikeys or, even worse, phone/email 2FA.

The great thing about Yubikeys is that I can associate backup keys for accounts (when they are supported), so if I lose one key, I can deactivate the lost key and use a backup key in its place.

With heavily locked-down 2FA apps, I have to hope I can do a full recovery on a new device, or go through the recovery code process, or start all over again w/ new 2FA codes. If I'm lucky, the app allowed me to have it installed onto a backup device.

It's way more complicated that just swapping in a new Yubikey.

It's only a security issue if you don't secure the cloud storage that's used for backups.

Google Authenticator and some other 2FA apps allow the user to export their tokens to other apps so you don't need to redo TOTP on every website.

The most secure method is to only have tokens on the 2FA device and to avoid using TOTP backup/restore altogether (or manually copy the tokens on a secondary 2FA device). It's a tradeoff between security vs. convenience.

Just got off Authy. They've done everything to trap customers into their broken platform, primarily by never allowing the user to export their tokens, either to file, or to another MFA application.

They also stopped supporting their desktop app, forcing users back onto a single point of failure: the mobile app.

If Twilio isn't going to support Authy in good faith, they should stop holding their remaining users hostage.

Kagi also seems to be built atop GCP. Not a great place to be if you want to compete against Google in the future.

Going to be pretty funny when pranksters start putting airtags into places where they can't be found just to annoy people with unknown tracker alerts.

The worst are the apps that will constantly bother you with an in-app popup to enable notifications, e.g. Goat. They make it come up randomly so you'll accidentally click on it.

Or apps that you pay for (Spotify Premium, Tidal) that will constantly bombard you with marketing in-app popups at random times. So instead of listening and enjoying my music, I can accidentally click on one of these landmines and get redirected to something I do not want.

I cancelled Spotify because of this. Will also cancel Tidal after my trial because they just copying the same ugly tactics as Spotify.

Already had my fill of Pixel 7 Pro problems. The screen failed to register any touches on it, twice. Once within warranty, once outside it. Best I could do is file a claim with my credit card company for a measly $300.

For a $1200 phone.

Had a bizarrely similar experience with the Pixel Watch.

The screen just failed to respond to touch. Wasted an hour figuring out how to get into fast boot mode. After a factory reset, it started working, but it doesn't get much more than 12-16 hours of battery time before needing a charge.

After losing a lot of money, time, and patience, I'm done with Google anything. Their hardware is garbage and they seem to have failed to address these issues with newer Pixel releases. Not sure what the point is of having 7 years of updates when the phone's hardware will barely last one of those years. And good luck with support.

Switched to a Samsung A54, and although it is slower and laggier in some aspects, the hardware is solid and I've been impressed at how clean OneUI is.

Tip: When your Pixel screen fails to respond to touch, you can at least plug in a USB mouse and recover what you can before tossing it into the dead gadget drawer.

Fun fact: So is the braking. There are no hydraulic backup systems in place.

Is there a plan to eventually switch over to self-hosting?

It seems like it might be bad to use a competitor for cloud services, although Kagi is small enough right now to not be on Google's radar...

On my iPhone 13 Pro, calendar notifications will fail, and the alarm clock will fail to ring. No idea why. I need to reboot my iPhone once a week to fix this issue, and it's been this way since I bought this phone a few years ago. No iOS updates has ever fixed this.

I also have issues with the sluggish interface. Some of my third-party email apps takes several seconds to just load the list of messages. They take milliseconds to load on a Pixel.

My lock screen can sometimes take a bit more than a second to unlock.

The browser dropdown will occasionally load the wrong page when I touch the URL.

The keyboard is more wrong than right, most of the time. Out of all the bugs and problems that make the iPhone almost unusable, it would be the terrible, auto-incorrect keyboard.

The analogy that comes to mind is when the auto industry consolidated to just three large players. Quality was never great to begin with, but it steeply declined after that. It took foreign companies to add real competition to the market.

Apple has been in decline for years now, especially since their only other competitors are Samsung and Google.

Sounds like you get it. It's unfortunate more people don't follow this mentality.

And there's no incentive to stop this. When email inboxes turn into marketing dumpsters, it just drives users to WhatsApp/Discord/FB Messenger/Slack/etc. for communication, which is good for those affiliated companies, but is bad for open platforms.

Sometimes I wonder if their mindset is, "Hey, even if only .05% engage w/ the marketing email, that's still > 0%!".

Maybe their mindset should really be, "Hey, we're annoying 99.95% of our users who did not consent to these emails, and > 50% will be turned off to our product and will associate our brand to that of a needy, attention-grabbing parasite".

If I wanted these emails, I would have opted in.

Instead, not only do they automatically opt you in, but they'll re-opt you in after you've unsubscribed. I've had it happen a year or two later; suddenly, I'm back on their spam list.

It's become so bad now that I can't even let a shopping cart sit anymore without getting a nagmail saying "HEY YOU NEED TO FINISH CHECKING OUT NOW1!!!".

That email is the reminder to empty my cart and never do business with them again.

Seriously, STFU and leave me alone. If your sales and marketing team insist on these tactics, you need to fire them and hire people who get it.