And that’s why the world is rapidly going to hell. Everyone is under attack and almost no one is willing to so much as lift a finger in resistance.

So, basically, they plan to install a dictatorship in which separation of powers, states’ rights, and meaningful judicial review do not exist.

Sounds about right.

How will I notice when the spare fails, if it’s only a spare and I don’t regularly use it? Then I’m down to only one key, and as any grumpy backup admin will tell you, if you have only one copy of something, you have zero copies.

I would have a key plugged into the computer pretty much all the time when I’m working, so anyone who compromises the computer can impersonate me as long as I’m at work. This would be mildly inconvenient to the attacker, but wouldn’t actually stop the attacker. And if the computer isn’t compromised, how is anyone going to get into my GitHub account even without 2FA? They certainly aren’t going to do it by guessing my 16-character generated password or Ed25519 SSH key.

Something-I-know is worthless for authentication in the age of GPU password cracking. Most humans, including myself, do not have photographic memories with which to memorize cryptographically secure passwords. We’re all using password managers for a reason, and a password database is something you have, not something you know.

Allowing a smartphone access to anything sensitive is even worse advice. Smartphones are notoriously insecure.

Hardware tokens are specifically designed to resist copying. Any means of copying it would be considered a security vulnerability.

Bits rot. A hardware token kept in a bank vault may or may not still work when I need it 10 years later, and there is no reasonable process for regularly verifying the integrity of its contents. Backup drives’ checksums are verified with every backup cycle, and so are the checksums on the file system being backed up (I’m using btrfs for that reason).

Hardware tokens are expensive. Mechanical lock keys are not.

I personally am afraid of this. What if something gets botched? I’ll be permanently locked out of my account!

I dislike MFA because it creates a risk of losing access to my account. I can back up my passwords; I can’t back up a hardware device.

Linux: “We’re dropping support for this device because we’re fairly sure we had the last one in existence and it just died.”

But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”

Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.

Cryptocurrency is a scam. Not just certain coins, but the whole concept. It’s nothing more than digital tulips.

JavaScript is a bad language, but what’s really bad about it is not the language itself but the ecosystem of libraries and tools. Getting just about anything to work is a huge struggle. Rust is much easier to use.

Having children is a horrible idea.

Email spam usually has heavily flawed English.

I’ve heard that this is intentional. It would be a waste of the spammer’s time to be contacted by people who are smart enough to not be fooled. Those smart people won’t bother contacting the spammer and wasting the spammer’s time if they see grammatical errors in a message that purports to be from a reputable organization, so the spammer throws in some errors to make the smart people filter themselves out. Or so the theory goes.

You won’t be able to use it. Only genuine Google Chrome.

Global warming is upon us. If something doesn’t drastically change, now, our entire species is going to die.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act will effectively make open-source software illegal, and that sure as hell isn’t pro-consumer. Neither is all the spooky surveillance and crippled cryptography they keep trying to mandate.

And yet, no one is rioting. Everyone is simply allowing this robbery to happen unchallenged.

Debian. Several reasons:

• It’s trustworthy.
• It’s not going anywhere. Debian existed when I was a kid and it’ll probably still exist when I draw my last breath.
• I know how to use it, since, once again, I’ve been using it since I was a kid.
• It has all the desktop environments.
• It fully supports systemd. I do not miss the unreliability, slowness, and complexity of what came before that. (Normally I wouldn’t mention this, but your former distro of choice exists solely for the purpose of not having systemd, so it’s relevant this time.)