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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • When most sites refer to passkeys, they’re typically talking about the software-backed kind that are stored in password managers or browsers. There are still device-bound passkeys though. Also since they’re just FIDO/WebAuthn credentials under the hood, you can still use hardware-backed systems to store them if you really want.

    While you’re right that device bound and non-exportable would be best from a security standpoint, there needs to be sufficient adoption of the tech by sites for it to be usable at all and sufficient adoption requires users to have options that have less friction/cost associated with them, like browser and password-manager based ones.

    Looking at it through the lens of replacing passwords instead of building the absolutely highest-security system helps explain why they’re not limited to device-bound anymore.


  • Sadly I’ve run into the same type of problem with a newer TLD as well. My solution was to get a domain in the older TLD space (e.g. .com, .net, .org). I doubt this will be the last site you run into that doesn’t support a newer TLD and the low likelihood that you’re going to be able to convince someone to fix the issue at every one of those outdated sites means that you’ll eventually need a backup domain for something.




  • I’d imagine that making it a user choice gets around some of the regulatory hurdles in some way. I can see them making a popup in the future to not use third-party cookies anymore (or partition per site them like Firefox does) but then they can say that it’s not Google making these changes, it’s the user making that choice. If you’re right that there’s few that would answer yes, then it gets them the same effective result for most users without being seen to force a change on their competitors in the ad industry.

    What’s the UK CMA going to do, argue that users shouldn’t be given choices about how they are tracked or how their own browser operates?









  • How it works: Chrome only displays the lookalike phishing protection screens for sites with similar domains to the ones you visit, which can be detected by a server when the site doesn’t load (the warning first appears instead).

    Summary from the conclusion:

    Lookalike Warnings are arguably a great safety feature that protects users from common threats on the web. It’s hard to balance effectiveness and good user experience, making Site Engagement a vital source of information. However, since disabling Site Engagement or Lookalike Warnings is impossible, we believe it’s important to discuss these features’ privacy implications. For some people, the risk of exposing their browsing history to a targeted attack might be far worse than being tricked by lookalike phishing websites. Especially given that site engagement is also copied into incognito sessions.




  • Considering this proposal is used for the key exchange, they definitely need to update both the client side and server side part to be able to make use of it. That’s the kind of thing that may take years but luckily it can fall back to older methods.

    It also needs to be thoroughly vetted so that’s why it’s a hybrid approach. If the quantum resistant algorithm turns out to have problems (like some others have), they’re still protected by the traditional part like they would have been, with no leaking of all the data.





  • I think the Firefox settings now call it the address bar when selecting if you want it to do both functions or have separate boxes. It may still be that internally.

    Also I just looked it up and apparently I was wrong anyways and the Chrome internal docs call it the omnibox actually…

    And the chromium developers blog calls it the address bar…

    And so does The Keyword (blog.google)…

    I think they’ve both given up on getting the public to use their special names now that it’s just an expected feature of a browser.