Goodbye Reddit, Hello Lemmy
First would be programming and second gaming. Not all my games I own, do work with ProtonDB and with programming, well parts we use, don’t work with Linux. We tried. Its probably just figuring out the right settings but spending several hours tweaking everything, in the hope to get it properly running, isn’t worth it, when it all runs on Windows out of the box.
You can rollback easily. I’ve upgraded to Windows 11 a while ago and after 48 hours, I rolled back to 10. But this is how I will feel like in October.
And no, Linux is NOT an option for me, at least for my main PC. My laptop gets Linux, as there I don’t do stuff, that isn’t running under Linux. But I still hope that Microslop does something good and fix their shit.
Of course everything can be hacked. When I think something is compromised, then I need to change everything. So far I didn’t heard of any remote zero click compromise. With the fancy hacking tools of some companies, its not publicly known how they gained access. I suspect either physical access or some malware. But we are speaking on a high level of hacking, that most people don’t need to be scared off. At that level, there are other things to worry about.
When we just look at the dangers an average person might encounter, this level of security is fine. I do had accounts compromised and I can exactly tell what my mistake was. One was sharing my password with someone else and not knowing how secure his devices where and not having 2FA. The second one was that I used the same password everywhere. At this point I was switching to generated passwords and still didn’t had every account changed (the unimportant ones).
Of course Passkeys are by nature a more secure implementation, as you are unable to save plaintext passwords but there is one thing that this can’t solve and that’s being that they remove and reset your auth, without verifying your identity. Hackers still can steal session tokens and sites don’t need to require additional authentification, when altering your authentification.
I quote myself from a different comment:
I just needed to think of the scene from the Simpsons, where Mr. Burns and Smithers go all through the security checks and in the end, there is a flimsy open backdoor, where a stray dog entered the room. All security in the front doesn’t matter, if the backdoor is not secure at all and until the backdoor is that unsecure, I’m not willing to add money and time, to make the front door more secure.
The phone argument lacks a bit. Accessing the TOTP App and the password manager do require a separate authentification, to get encrypted. Sure if they snatch my phone away, when its fully unlocked, including my password manager, they have access for a limited time. They need to be fast enough, until I can remotly lock it or until it automatically locks itself. Android phones can now detect when they are stolen. Either by the movement or when it goes offline. The latter I tested and it’s not instant, but you still don’t have long.
I don’t think about potential backdoors. If there is no known backdoor, then I deem it save. Sure they also could me to unlock the phone. This would be xkcd 538. And this applies to any security.
Adding more security and inconvenience doesn’t make sense to me, so long the backend is shit. So far a few big companies did screw up hard in their backend and dozens of smaller sites do some bad stuff, that it doesn’t really matter how strong your login is. Here I reference back to my quote.
In a closed system, like a company, this added security makes sense, as they usually control the backend as well. If my CEO would send me a text request to reset his logins, I would call him or walk to his office, and ask him directly. Sure with AI, they could impersonate his voice but I don’t think they can impersonate his way to speak.
I didn’t invested too much time into hardware keys but requiring additional software on other PCs, still is a no-go for me. With my current setup, I only need my smartphone and I always carry it around.
For business use, this is a whole different topic. With a proper setup, all machines would require the software and you shouldn’t access these accounts outside from company devices. Its also an expense which the company must carry and its easier for them to handle backups. Also in that Setup, you can have SSO/LDAP, where you can physically proof that you are you and requesting resetting the MFA. With an online service, they usually require a weak proof, like just the access to an email account.
I just needed to think of the scene from the Simpsons, where Mr. Burns and Smithers go all through the security checks and in the end, there is a flimsy open backdoor, where a stray dog entered the room. All security in the front doesn’t matter, if the backdoor is not secure at all and until the backdoor is that unsecure, I’m not willing to add money and time, to make the front door more secure.
Vanilla KeePass. The Dev isn’t interested to providing a communication outside of its program, but he clarified, that plugins have all the right access, to do that but as it seemed to the dev, there is no dev interested to making such a plugin. KeePassXC does support it but they are still missing entry templates. This is the only missing feature that is holding me back to switch.
Or the obscure ways for 2FA/MFA. Passkeys are mostly cloud based. Yeah fuck no! The weakest Passkey is weaker than my usual random generated password, if the site don’t do any shady business and require a weak password. Hardware keys are luckily not pushed for usage. I don’t like them either. You require at least 2, for backup reasons. They also cost quite some money and they have zero auth. Just connect to usb and tap it. Also retrieving the backup and get a replacement for a defective one, takes some time.
Good old TOTP as 2FA is perfect, paired with a strong, random password. With my TOTP, I have an encrypted backup in my cloud, on my NAS, older backups in secure places and backup codes in several places. The TOTP App I use is open source and I have a mirror of the source code.
This should be enough security, if sites don’t screw up all the time. You can bypass 2FA all the time. Even the credit card company screwed up big time. Usually you get 2 separate letters, one with your pin and one with your card. Both came on the same day. Also I actually didn’t needed the pin in the first place. I was able to add the card to the app and see the pin there, without actually verifying anything, except the credit card number.
Maybe when passkeys are supported in my password manager, I will try it but so far it isn’t and switching is not an option, as it doesn’t support the features I need. There is an open issue for an alternative password manager, with that feature request and it has some people wanting it, but its still not added. But passkeys doesn’t fix the issue for me using stronger keys, it fixes the site owners to allow stronger keys but they are still not required to use it. Some devs are just weird. I’ve read one PR for an FOSS project I use, where someone wanted to implement a universal oath or such stuff, that would support all types of external authentifications. Nope, the dev refused the PR and they wanted to stay at the 2 proprietary implementations, for 2 services, even though this universal implementation would work with these 2 too. I can’t tell exactly what it was. I was experimenting with an auth service for my self hosted stuff, to not deal with several accounts and rights systems. This service was the first one which I wanted to switch and they didn’t wanted to support it, leaving me with the standard login.
Yes, the software I use is heavily connected within Windows. Old versions where developed for MacOS and Linux, but they dumped that for quite some time. They even use sub .NET5 as framework. Even our customers are pissed with Windows 11, as they now all upgrade or already upgraded. For SSL key stuff, I do use WSL as well, as I couldn’t really got it working under Windows.
When you really want to know what pain is, try working with their admin panels. I did learn some basic Windows Server stuff but their admin panels… all Windows OSes are childs play. I would rather use Windows 8 (not 8.1) or Vista, as this shit. And the joke is, we don’t use the complicated stuff. Office, Visual Studio and Teams (well we do need some meeting software and if we have Teams, why not using it?). Office is a requirement, as our document/archive/CMS system only has an plugin for Word under Windows. We tried switching, but outside the IT department, no one, even the CEO, took some time to test alternatives, that they feel comfortable to use. For building our software, I actually want to look if there is a better solution but no time and a massive backlog. We need to argue a lot with our CEO, when we mention we change some of the operation stuff.
But hey, there is some good things. I convinced the company to use a Linux Server for some stuff. Inside the IT, we can and do switch stuff, when it benefits our workflow but outside, nobody is interested, even though it could make stuff so much easier. We did installed a test system and gave everyone access but nobody tested it.