Korthrun

Microsoft pivoted to Skype. Saved you a click and reading about 1000 words.

In addition to many of the fine points made in other comments I think it’s silly to overlook the power of celebrity worship and weird-ass parasocial relationships with famous people.

There exists a large number of people who aren’t really interested in discussing <topic_x>, they just want to know what <favourite celebrity whos life I have deluded myself into thinking is attainable by me> thinks about the topic so that they can regurgitate it and feel like they’re “the same”.

I’m sure if Chappell Roan or whatever “the kids” think is cool these days had jumped to Mastodon we’d be seeing something very different. TBH I’m mildly surprised that we didn’t see more record labels standing up instances. It’s always boggled me that people have just trusted the service desperately trying to be known as “X” as an authority on identity.

I saw the lack of arm and facepalmed but I was half asleep poo posting so got over it :p (fixed now!)

I’ve been using this device for ~5 years now, so my memory is a little hazy on it, but I’m pretty sure for the particular device I prefer (which is to say, I have nfc what the setup is for other vendors, which could be greatly superior) the AES-256 key used for encryption isn’t generated until you setup your first card.

How would any company, regardless of geography have the secret I generated? This is a stand alone hardware device. They seller is not involved at all once I’ve received my package.

Could a sophisticated/well resourced actor clone the smart card they stole or you lost? Sure, brute force attacks are brute force attacks. At least you’d know your device and card are stolen. Now you’re in a race to reset your passwords before they finish making 500 clones of the smart card they stole.

Hypothetically I could blackmail someone at LastPass and have a backdoor is installed for me.

Someone could bust down my door while I have it connected and unlocked and just login to all my things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That will vary from vendor to vendor. In the case of the one I like there are a few relevant things.

The password db is stored encrypted on the device. Accessing the passwords requires all of:

• the device
• a smartcard with a particular secret on it
• the 4 digit hex pin to unlock the secret on said smartcard, which is what is used to decrypt the db

Three PIN failures and the smart card is invalidated.

That sort of covers “stolen” and “lost + recovered by a baddie”. Your bad actor would need to have their hands on both physical pieces and guessed the 4 digit hex code in 3 tries.

As far as a user recovering from a lost or failed device or smart card goes, you can export the encrypted version of the db for backups, which I do to a thumb drive I keep in my document safe. I do the same with a backup smart card. So that and a backup device or purchasing a new one if yours fails or is lost/stolen.

In the super “just in case” move, I also keep a keepassdb on said thumb drive. In case my device fails and it’s just not possible to get a new one. Kind of like keeping two cloud providers in case LastPass goes bankrupt or something.

I’m a pretty big fan of the mooltipass. They’re sold out and between iterations right now, but a new one is expected soon. One of my coworkers is pretty into their OnlyKey.

So many folks talking about which software they use, and how they sync it between devices etc.

You all know there are hardware password keepers right? They present to your devices as a usb and/or bluetooth keyboard and just type out the user/password that you select. They have browser plugins to ease the experience. Now your password is not even stored on the device you’re using to perform your login and it will work on any modern device even without internet access.

Oh and no subscription fee to cover the costs of cloud infrastructure.