Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | HaloZero's commentslogin

My MIL setup a passkey accidentally on her Google account and now has no idea where it is. Removing it now requires her password which she’s also forgotten. But now for some reason on Google I can’t initiate any type of forgot your password flow because of how Google sets up things and I have zero clue where she stored the passkey.

Ran into the same issue with my dad the other day. Has a passkey set up on his Google account. Bear in mind that he doesn’t know what a passkey is, so Google obviously sent him through a pattern at one point to get him to create one.

He didn’t have access to it the other day and we needed access to his account. He didn’t remember his password, and we were unable to reset it because you need the passkey! No other options to authenticate for a reset were available.

Add in the fact that I was trying to help him with this by long distance call and you can imagine the frustration.


>He didn’t remember his password, and we were unable to reset it because you need the passkey! No other options to authenticate for a reset were available.

Google treats both a password and a passkey as a primary factor, and if you forget either of them you have to go through their account recovery flow: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439?hl=en

AFAIK there's nothing different about the recovery scenario for a Google account in that state regardless of whether it has a password in use as its primary cred, a passkey in use as primary credential, or both.


Thanks. Upon further investigation we could have hit “Try another way” on the account recovery process UI a few times to get to a workable account recovery method.

Would be nice if Google would lay your recovery options out for you (which I am used to it doing in regard to 2FA if you are doing a regular log in) instead of having to hammer the “Try another way” link repeatedly as it cycles through options.


WDYM -- I thought "try another way" is supposed to list all possible options instead of cycling through them!

As someone with elderly parents, the Googles and the Microsofts of the world really don't seem to give a shit about the elderly anymore, if they ever did. Random UI updates and workflow changes with no announcements, thinking they're "intuitive."

One of these days the product managers who push these things thinking "oh, it's easy, you just . . ." are either going to be explaining it to confused Mom or Dad, or they're going to be elderly and irritated themselves. Until then I hope they stub their toe or step on random Legos regularly.


I'm not even elderly but I would really like an e-mail client with a stable UI. I used to like Apple Mail but it's been a buggy mess since Catalina. It doesn't even sort or search mail reliably any more. It's basically a trope at this point but a robot-rewrite-in-Rust seems inevitable at this point.

A while ago I helped an elderly relative migrate off off a copy of Eudora that they'd been using for many years. (To Thunderbird.)

Originally it was about difficulty migrating to a new laptop with a different version of Windows, but I was quite firm about it because when I realized it wasn't able to do secure connections for some reason, so the instant they took their laptop to public Wi-Fi...


P.S.: Migrating decades of local messages was a huge problem. It's been so long that many import/export tools are defunct. I was even loading up extremely old versions of Thunderbird to see if I could import to that and then upgrade.

However the GitHub edition (not Sourceforge) of Eudora2Unix [0] saved me and deserves a shout-out here.

It took some tweaks and a harness to repeatedly try the conversion, since I wanted something I could literally drop into the Thunderbird profile folder. The final result wasn't perfect, (some file attachment issues linger) but it's way better than having it all at risk of Eudora.exe just refusing to launch one day.

[0] https://github.com/jonabbey/eudora2unix


I set my father (late 70s) up with a physical passkey (yubikey), and a backup key. He uses it for the important accounts (google, apple, bank, etc).

It’s been fine.


Yubikeys generally have much worse recovery scenarios than passkeys do, for consumers. In enterprise if you lose your yubikey, an IT admin can help you get back into your account. If you lose a security key as a consumer, you're generally in a much tougher account recovery situation.

You need extra backup keys in a safe place. They don’t explain that well.

Not all services let you enroll multiple keys. Amazon, with all the money in the world, was guilty of this for a long time.

Practically, it is a huge challenge. I would want my day to day fob, an onsite backup, and an offsite backup. That’s a lot of hassle and potential for mistakes. To even register the offsite backup means I need access to it. Remotely copying a password database is so much reliable


If you use a security key only for the most important accounts like Apple or Google, keys are set up once and then unchanged for years.

This is why I've always been a fan of these. They are easy for laypeople to understand.

Yep, I've never had Google, PayPal, or Amazon ask me about a passkey with a yubikey.

The current ones are passkeys

Doesn't the passkey have to be on her phone or computer?

It should be but haven’t checked her apple vault. I checked Google password manager and her windows password manager and there nothing in either. She might have used her phone and it’s in her iOS vault which I’ll check next. But this is what makes this entire passkey thing a mess. She’s 75, she didn’t do this on purpose and the ecosystem is just a mess

Everything about it is.

Also in the process of helping my dad with his phone, 76 and my grandmother 99. Maybe this works better with Apple, but the biggest problem on Android is, that it feels like every update shuffles everything around. Allmost no point in explaining, that they can solve some things on their own.

And all the time new things on the screen, new features they don't understand, need nor asked for.


Im young and I dont even bother learning how to use my Android phone's new features since it feels like everything moves or changes all the time. there's no point trying to get familiar with most of the features.

That's because most people at Google use iPhones as their primary phones, they hardly know or care about the UX

if any android pms or execs read this comment, it should be like a slap in the face. a scathing indictment of the state of their product.

just hang their heads in shame and walk into the sea


We're at a point where the biggest possible contribution to humanity of many PMs in big corps would be to just... drop dead. Feature-freeze rather than furthering the enshittification, as that seems all they're capable of.

I'd wish the world would just become boring again.


They’d just hire more to replace them and keep chaos machine running

Apple does seem to have one of the best and most secure passkey implementations.

A little snarky, but...

It _is_ true that it's more secure when even the people that the passkey was created for can't use it.


They seem unnecessarily opaque about it all.

I just made one for PayPal using my MacBook which seems to have ended up in Bitwarden rather than the mac thing. But there's nothing in Bitwarden to say list all passkeys. Not sure how I check elsewhere. Maybe they should email you "you have created a paypal passkey in Tim's Bitwarden" or something. Then at least you could search the email for "passkey"?

I wonder if I can use Bitwarden on another device with that? I honestly don't know.


You can't search for passkeys, but you can search for logins by URL and check the much shorter list for passkeys. The good news is that having the passkey in Bitwarden means you can use it on another device.

Even the concept of "where on the PC" has been totally annihilated by OS vendors and app developers. Is it on the filesystem? Is it on The Cloud? Is it vaguely "In An App"? Is it in some "Secure Enclave"? Who the fuck knows anymore? And the apps are no help--they insist on blurring the lines between local and cloud, hiding full paths, and generally just saying "Don't worry about where your data actually is. We pinky swear to be able to find it for you!"

Windows prompting her about Bluetooth for the pass key threw me too. I thought for sure she had clicked the wrong thing before I realized that somehow her widows pass key requires communicating to some device? Maybe her phone? No idea

I know on my Windows if I sign into icloud.com I have the option of using a passkey which I do by scanning a picture with my iPhone and it also using Bluetooth, presumably to prove physical presence of it.

No, it doesn't have to be associated with the phone, and IMO you are better off not letting the big tech companies own your identity, which is effectively getting Apple or Google to store it in your phone for you ends up being. There are physical passkeys that feel like a door key in everyday use. You can attach them to your house key ring, and like house keys are near indestructible. Lookup the Yubikey 5 NFC.

The only downside is unlike a house key, you can't get a backup "cut". Copying a physical passkey currently isn't possible. If you lose it, you've lost access to all your logins. As the article says, their recommended workaround is to keep backup physical passkeys, and log all your passkeys (including the backups) into every site. Which is insane - very few people have the patience to do that.

The article is really a long rant about that one issue - there is currently no way to securely backup a physical passkey. Solve that, and all the other issues melt away.


Who the fuck knows?

I for sure don't. Websites only know there is a passkey associated with my account, and the OS only knows there might be one on the device, or maybe on another device, and offers me options to check here or do a Bluetooth/QR Code dance, and when all of them fail, I'm no closer to knowing where the damn passkey is.


Has any country really reversed the diminishing fertility rate with industrialization without religious zealotry? I honestly don’t think money is the factor here. Yes it matters but $40k is nothing. That covers maybe a year or two of daycare in the states. It needs to be a cultural change but not sure what would reverse it.

Or we set a max age of the population where you off yourself. It’s the plot of Half a Life in Star Trek TNG


I'm saying 40k per year per kid per year. That's not a magic number, but it's something like where if you have 2-3 kids, one parent doesn't need to work because their income is replaced by a child subsidy. Alternatively, if both parents work, daycare is paid for, along with the other expenses of having a kid. Now, that does mean taxes have to go up a lot. Maybe you don't need such a high number. You could play around with it and see what works.

On the other hand, prospective parents have to believe that the money will keep flowing, or the incentive isn't as strong. In that case, maybe something like giving new parents a house is a better bet because they'd own that regardless of what future governments do.


But why does it need to be reversed?

We are at the same time experiencing all the challenges and consequences of depleting the planet of resources, a warming climate and shortages everywhere. Why can less people in a natural way not be part of the solution?


You’ll need to kill people off at say 70. Healthcare meds increase dramatically when you get older and older, and that means more people needed to care. When the worker:dependence ratio increases you end up with people emigrating or care reducing.

That's where spreading the young population around via migration comes in, but people are racist and can't tolerate that.

In your solution you also wouldn't have to kill people off. They would die naturally due to a lack of healthcare.


Why would you have immigration in that scenario? Other countries would also lack people.

Other first world countries. The global population overall is still slightly increasing because 3rd world countries have plenty of children.

As for the why: because historically that has always been a solution to lacking specialized talent or simply not having enough hands to perform a massive task. You don't want to pay domestic labor, so bring in foreign labor. This time it's a general problem.


>why does it need to be reversed?

Because a major superpower dying out doesn't really benefit anyone except potential conquerors.


Has any country really tried?

To have multiple kids you need bigger house, more stuff and more time.

To have 2+ kids you either neglect them or should become stay at home parent. It's only for rich, for families who can comfortably live on one salary.

The other thing is time: people who want many kids want to spend time with them, not at work. But without work they cannot afford kids. Catch-22.


>It's only for rich, for families who can comfortably live on one salary.

or collectivist societies. We completely forgotten the old adage: "it takes a village to raise a kid". 3rd world countries still increase in population because everyone chips in to care for everyone's kids, not simply staying within their own house raising their own kid by themselves.

>The other thing is time: people who want many kids want to spend time with them, not at work. But without work they cannot afford kids. Catch-22.

This is definitely another piece of the puzzle, one within the levers of government. Shorter work weeks for the same or more pay would alleviate this issue. But that's something the elite will fight tooth and nail to prevent.


In 3rd world countries having children is also a retirement plan because government does not guarantee much for elderly. Not sure if developed countries want to go there though.

$40k is an average full time age after tax and student loans in the U.K

But we’d rather tax workers to the hilt to pay for wealthy old people. Isla refreshing to see the op mention that “savings” are just a claim on future work. When there’s 10 billionaires who need care and 2 people who can provide it, how much will those carers charge.

The other solution is high immigration. If you can import 18 year olds it’s win win win. At least for old rich people. Keep wages down, no tax money on new generations.


How did you generate the images for all the routines? I’ve been wanting to really build something like but for games that you can play with your newborn

All images were generated by Gemini. For me so far the best model when it comes to image generation.

I think you’re out of luck. If Apple can’t sell the mini I don’t know who will enter the market.

They still sold millions of minis. Can't sell is about relative terms to the rest of their iphone sales. Against that it looks poor. Against mac pro sales probably looks amazing. Sold by any other company the phone would probably be considered a success and still in the lineup.

And really, poor sales are no excuse. How many macbook skus do they have that barely move when you go through all the permutations of config? I don't want to work it out but I'd guess there are something like 24 skus of macbook pro they are barely selling in comparison to iphone sales. What's another model iphone in 3 storage tiers?


Another phone model is massively more expensive compared to changing RAM or storage in, say, the macbook lineup.

Yes, a challenge for a company as small as Apple.

They can do it for sure, but they've deemed it's not worth it. I trust that they're in the business of making money when they feel it's worthwhile.

Apple sold plenty of minis. It just wasn’t a blockbuster. They also didn’t sell many pluses. They also didn’t sell many Airs.

For context, Apple sold 6 million minis, most Android manufacturers (other than Samsung and Google) can only dream of that volume.

Apple can do it, they just choose not to. It’s not like AVP is a roaring sales success.


They came out with the AVP saying it was niche production and made very few of them to begin with. They expected not to sell very many of them.

With that logic they shouldn’t sell a $2k folding phone either, it’s a niche market

Difference is they made a mini, it sold poorly, every time they make a phone with a bigger screen it sells like hotcakes.

They could. I think it would be nice if they would choose to.

I doubt they lost money on it. I’m guessing they just “didn’t make enough“ and decided it would be more profitable to spend that money elsewhere.

I will say as a software developer it was rough getting things working on that tiny screen.

But I know people loved it. I have family members who did. And I totally get it. But it just doesn’t seem to be a big enough part of the market for any of the big players to care at all.


What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?


completely independent development. not based on any existing browser. we need more browser variety.


Most people don't care about that though. My wife doesn't care about browser independence. If Ladybird wants to more than just a pet project for some tech companies it needs a sell. Something that makes it better than Chrome.


ladybird is way to early in development to sell itself to anyone except developers who might want to contribute to it. they need to get it working first before they can think about interesting features that might make it attractive. it's not the time for that yet


Will they finally integrate automated recording of interactions? It’s such a pain to record everything which is why I never used it


How would it even be possible? How could it automatically know you met in person and what you did? Or you had a phone call with someone (at least on iOS, access to call logs is not allowed)? Or any other interaction?


Wouldn’t they also stop AirPods from working?


Whenever I hear leaking earbuds on public transport, it's invariably AirPods


What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")


Author here.

I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.

I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.


Have a look at the librespot pinned issues, you’ll see the reports from folks experiencing this. You may also be able to find the legal threats they sent out to third party client libraries if you search carefully (many have been redacted.)


Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.


They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on.

Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.


> Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open

That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.

The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...


Bit of an unfair take.

You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace?

I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).


> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects

The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.


> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects

Tell that to Nintendo


Nintendo is fighting a fairly large emulator scene, not a fringe market of custom front ends for a web service. I’m not defending Nintendo, it’s just a different scope.

Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.


I've seen some ads slip through the cracks nowadays, like I think Wikia ads for some TV shows I go to now have ads on them. They gave up on blocking Meta.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: