Passkeys, Gyroscopes, Linux Boot 

1. Passkeys - Long post how Passkeys are bad (@fy.blackhats.net.au) - This is interesting post, because they're looking for all kind of excuses to explain how the technology is bad. This is post with specific narrative from very limited viewpoint. With that kind of scope, you can usually call anything bad and tell how it could be made better, and claim that the current solution is extremely bad. I personally can't agree that Passkeys would be bad technology, it's still almost infinitely better than passwords. And that's what it should be compared to with current world situation. - Sure, Passkeys doesn't sign requests with user verifiable data. I've pointed out that problem with so many authentication systems. Next question is, if there is any good authentication system available, at all. I think the answer practically is no? Either the systems are on vulnerable platform or if the system is very limited, then usually the data validation by signer isn't done properly. - Many of the listed things are just bad implementation.  But I have to agree, that with Firefox, Linux and Google the UX was extremely bad for a long time and authentication did get broken several times due constant changes. But I have to agree about complexity, fragility and bad experiences as early adopter. This brings up classic questions, when something is about stupid user, or bad specification or bad implementation. Interesting question, password manager gives a better experience than passkeys, but the password manager handles the passkeys already, what's the difference of using passkeys from password manager versus using password from password manager? Also the password manager doesn't protect the keys on potentially compromised platform. Does this mean that people using password manager shouldn't use SSH keys, because you can always use password manager? Have you ever tried typing in several 20+ characters long completely random passwords with special characters on mobile device, that's excellent  Almost everyone seems to also miss the point that you should always have two keys, not just one. UX. kw: FIDO, FIDO2, Webauthn (@ Wikipedia), Passkeys ref: Hacker News discussion about the post (@ news.ycombinator.com) covers as usual many different aspects and experiences. There are also reasons why devices specific keys and sessions should be used. How do you lock out just the key, if all devices share the same key(s)?

2. Some discussion about gyroscopes, but it's like many other discussions, there are industry standard laser ring gyros, those are as accurate as those are. And then there are other "lab tech grade" gyros, like quantum gyroscopes, which are very expensive and no good details are available about those. Discussing those is kind of pointless, because nobody can verify the facts. But those are likely to be much more accurate than the industry standard ones, how much? Who knows. It's just like "accurate clocks", there are accurate clocks and much more accurate clocks, when you go to state of art clocks. UK has tested airborne Q-INS systems and those should be adopted by commercial aviation soonish. - Gyroscope (@ Wikipedia)

3. Friend had a too small boot partition, we replaced GRUB2 with XBOOTLDR, which allowed necessary kernel updates to be installed after that. After checking a few systems, it seems that the boot partition size is very random on different systems. Some had 50 MB, some had 500 MB and some got 1 GB, and so on. Well, that system is now fixed. I've personally and usually resized partition in cases where I've encountered a problem like that, but in this specific case, it wasn't easy or viable option. - A long discussion about Linux boot loaders, can Windows, blah blah. All the standard stuff. UEFI needs vfat partition (ESP) and you can use different boot loaders like Windows to boot Linux and GRUB2 to boot Windows, etc. - Sure, that's one of the things you can fine tune and play with as much as you want to, but what are the practical benefits? - Unless there's some very specific reason what requires to tune and tinker with the stuff. Of course for Linux only systems one option is to use UKI the Unified Kernel Image stored in EFI partition with EFISTUB. kw: Linux Boot (@ Wikipedia)
   On my current setup, boot is pretty light:
   6288 kibibytes of 1092344 kibibytes = used ~1%

2024-12-29