johngalt

That is not the way human beings typically evaluate risks. 'Acceptable risks' are more about psychology and not a statistical calculation. A self driving car that is twice as safe as the human average would be considered an unacceptable risk.

Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.

Think of it like SSH authorized keys but automated for the web. Instead of storing the keys in a file; it stores them in a hardware security module (yubikey, or TPM).

Registration generates an asymmetric key pair between your passkey, and the website. Login is the usual challenge/response process. The biggest step forward is phishing resistance. A fake login page can relay a TOTP code, but not the passkey challenge/response.

If you want a consistent, and seamless authentication experience, then one party has to own that experience. Go federation/SSO. Sign into everything with microsoft, or google as your identity provider, and live with the privacy implications.

Passkeys are great, and they take a significant amount of work away from the user, and make them much less prone to phishing attacks while also not turning their entire online identity into the property of google. I've had much more luck with onboarding non-technical people into a yubikey vs a password manager. Platform authenticators tend to trip people up. However, the process of adding a new key is getting much more consistent, and legible to people over time, and things will settle on platform authenticators rather than external physical keys for most use cases.

The largest disconnect between then and now, is the degree to which the internet was many things (telnet, ftp, usenet, finger, gopher, http, irc, mail, etc...), and not just webpages. Each with their own specific flavors. The article is trying to recapture that to a small degree.

Over time, almost everything has been compressed into this HTTP/HTML/JScript agglomeration. When the original thought was that there would be dozens of protocols for various uses, and a lot more client applications than the browser.

The best analogy I can think of is, imagine that plays(theaters), movies(bigscreens), novels(books), operas(concert halls), art(galleries), museums, etc... All disappeared in favor of delivering that content through games on your Xbox. All of that experience compressed into one method. Then the next generation says:

"Why would anyone miss physical art galleries? I can see art much faster on the 'Louvre 2026-season pass' on my Xbox? No travel, no walking, no lines."

FYI, the included cartridges in a new printer are typically a 'low capacity' type. This has been true for 20+ years. You may find yourself both spending a large amount of money, and generating a significant amount of e-waste if you pursue this strategy.

It is important to check consumable cost when buying a printer. They aren't all the same in this regard.

Probably not, but some games it is better to lose.

This problem is why so many organizations will do an SSO tax.

The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?

There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."

We can certainly imagine a limiting factor based on our prior development. Imagine a world where large amounts of coal or oil never formed, or formed in a manner that made it inaccessible to a pre-industrial revolution society. Without easily accessible chemical energy, the technical progress made during the industrial revolution probably takes 1000 years instead of 100.

The age of discovery was a similar scenario. Imagine a different world where 2/3rds of the continents are uninhabitable desert/tundra/arctic, and there was no economic benefit to better ships, clocks, astronomy, cartography. Delays social development of joint stock corporations etc...

Organized crime would be more... organized. There would be servers, infrastructure and documentation. Designed to say exactly the right thing to whoever was looking.

This is garden variety, SMB fraud.

"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."