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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 14th, 2023

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  • I’m hoping and assuming that apps would need to ask for permission to use this, lest this turn into every app fighting to push their own dynamic island notification to the top bar, just like how back then every app wanted to have its own persistent notification and also that time when every app provided minor status updates using global toasts that didn’t specify which app created it, so you could be doing something in a completely different app and you’d get a completely random and unattributed toast with some vague message like “connection failed” with no way outside of third party apps to figure out which app sent it. /rant



  • Don’t wp updates and plugins only come from one of the 2? Anyway I’m pretty sure they’re just mad that wpengine uses bandwidth from the wp update infrastructure without paying instead of hosting their own update infrastructure, which basically means that selfhosters / individuals are not the target. That said it still sounds like the dude is being hella petty about it.





  • Sounds like those “soft touch” plastic surfaces. I’ve had a bunch of old plastic things turn sticky that way - it’s really hard to get it off but what I do is alternate between isopropyl, WD40 (brushed on with a cotton swab or cotton ball and let it sit for a while to let it break down the sticky before using Clorox or isopropyl to remove the WD40), and Clorox wipes. Eventually the matte finish comes off and you’re left with a shiny plastic surface. It just takes a lot of elbow grease, I often give myself finger blisters from scrubbing but it’s a relief to get it off.

    Edit: also the last time I did this was on some old lighters which had a soft touch plastic which turned sticky, what ended up happening was the WD40 seemed to help soften the sticky stuff which allowed me to push it around by rubbing really firmly in one direction. If you push it towards one spot it’ll bunch up like softened sticker goo, then I use Clorox wipes to pinch up the bits of collected goo. It still took a lot of rubbing to get the last sticky stuff off to reveal the shiny plastic underneath but “migrating” the goo into a pile once softened by the WD40 (but degreasing the excess WD40 with the Clorox wipes before rubbing so that your finger doesn’t just slip) seemed to be the strategy for my sticky lighters.

    Hope that helps you figure out something that works for you




  • The key difference is that during normal use, the private key of the passkey doesn’t leave the device (or password manager). The passkey basically comes in 2 parts, the public and private (secret) part. In order to log in, the website presents a cryptographic challenge that is only solvable using your private key - and crucially you can solve the challenge without revealing your private key. An attacker could get your answer to the challenge and still be unable to solve additional challenges without the private part of your passkey.

    This of course makes it basically impossible to manually log in using a passkey and a keyboard, without any password manager to do the cryptographic calculations (unless you have a LOT of paper and time), but the security advantage of making it near impossible to be phished is generally regarded as a net positive. In order to steal a passkey there would need to be a vulnerability in the software, since passkeys make it much harder to trick a user into giving it away (since tricking the user into logging in on a fake website doesn’t work due to the aforementioned cryptography, the main way to steal a passkey would be to trick the user into exporting it - which is a much higher bar).


  • If you mean the “passkeys” that are becoming popular as a “password replacement”, it’s basically speaking a public private keypair. What makes it more secure is that, under normal conditions (aside from backing up the passkey), the private “secret” part of the keypair never leaves the app or device it’s stored on. It’s only used temporarily to sign messages and prove that you have the secret key, unlike a password which needs to be sent securely to a server to validate.

    You could in theory store a backup on a USB drive but since passkeys are new, it highly depends on the password manager you use to store the passkey. Since passkeys are more complex than something you can memorize/type, it has to be stored in a password manager of some sort to be useful, so you would need to check that password manager allows backing up passkeys. There is currently work being done to standardize the formats/protocols to transfer passkeys so it seems this is very much up in the air. For example, I use BitWarden which stores passkeys, but it seems like I can only add or delete passkeys to an entry, not export them and apparently they get exported with the passwords when the vault is exported. BitWarden also syncs your vault to every logged in device though so you could see that as a form of backup. Going one step further, even though BitWarden doesn’t have a passkey export/backup feature yet (in addition to Bitwarden’s vault export), the self-hosted server also stores all your passwords including passkeys in regular files which also can be backed up (this is how I back up my VaultWarden instance) - although it would probably be hard to use that backup in any other way besides restoring it onto a BitWarden server instance.

    Edit: I didn’t realize passkeys were exported with the vault export, since I haven’t used it and noticed that editing an entry doesn’t allow you to view passkey data - only remove, updated my comment to reflect that.





  • First I’ll say, if you aren’t able to boot a windows installer off of a flash drive (and nothing’s wrong with your flash drive and you created it without errors and there isn’t a setting in bios preventing you from booting it like disabled USB boot) then it could be a hardware issue that Linux won’t fix (it’s not clear how you tried to reinstall windows). But if you’re able to get to the windows logo or the menu for safe mode then it sounds like it “POSTs” (gets past showing the bios screen) and windows should be reinstallable. In short, I think it’s unlikely to be a problem that only Linux can fix if you want to stick with windows.

    That said, if you are otherwise interested in trying Linux and create a USB installer, most will allow you to exit the installer or choose to go into a temporary “live desktop” where nothing is saved, so it’s a good opportunity to try out how that distro feels to use - just don’t save anything important. And if you do end up installing either OS, you can use that “live mode” to use programs to back up any files from your main hard drive to another plugged in drive.