[exabrial]

With physical U2F key, I could explain to my 78 year-old-parents "this is a physical key needed to access your account. Think of it like the front door key to your house. Don't lose it or lend it to anyone. We should have a couple of backup keys too." And they got completely understood and added it to all of their accounts. This was not hard. People assumed consumers were too stupid to do this without even giving them a chance.

[xur17]

I never found a comfortable way to ensure all of my accounts had more than one U2F key associated with them. I always wished there was a way to have 2 physical U2F keys, one on me, and by adding one to an account, both would work.

As is, I had to either:

- Keep both on me, and add both - I am at risk of losing both at the same time

- Keep one one me, one in a safe - I have to keep track of which device I've added to which service, and periodically take the backup one out of the safe and iterate through the "new" services

I was never satisfied with either approach, so I ended up with an OTP app with backups.

[epistasis]

If you're comfortable with OTP with backups, does a password manager like 1password, with backups, fit your needs? Or would you prefer to self-manage your backups on your own storage?

I ask because I'm curious about others' practices and desires here, not with any promise of a better solution!

[xur17]

Yeah, 1password or keepass are both fine solutions for password managers in my mind.

[JohnFen]

> Don't lose it or lend it to anyone. We should have a couple of backup keys too.

Honestly, this is one of the two things that make me hate passkeys. The key management is a high-friction pain in the ass.

[TeMPOraL]

And/or maybe the vendors were annoyed that people would lend the keys anyway, refusing to accept that it is normal because that's how delegation of authority works in real life too. House keys are also things you often lend to a third party that you want/need to access your house in your absence, and in fact making extra duplicated for trusted third parties is normal.

Software vendors continue to refuse to support, or even accept the existence of, this entire class of use cases for regular consumers (they are, however, more than happy to milk enterprises on convoluted implementations of those).

[xboxnolifes]

Sure, but i would never want a physical key to something important. Physical keys get lost, so the front door spare is under the flower pot.

And now I have another thing I need to carry everywhere.

[kotaKat]

I still can't even get a physical key anywhere in person. You can certainly get phones just about anywhere, but you can't get any FIDO keys at brick and mortar, last I checked.

Until I can tell Grandma to "go down to Walmart and ask the man at the electronics counter for a Yubikey", we still have a few issues.

(No. Ordering online is *not* a valid option in this scenario. If I want to order a Yubikey to this address at this exact moment in time and space, Amazon won't deliver one to me for at least six days at the earliest, based on their rural delivery estimate. Replacing a key is basically impossible.)

[Telaneo]

I can in fact buy one at a local brick-and-mortar store, but the price is triple/quadruple the amount I'd pay for a copy of my house key. Add in that the whole flow is something grandma is not going to be able to grok, and the whole idea is still-born.

If I were administrating that part of her life too, then maybe, but I'm not really happy with how Yubikey has solved for this problem either. If I could buy them for nearly throwaway amounts of money, and I could make backup copies without issue, then I might even jump on that particular train myself.

[simoncion]

> Amazon won't deliver one to me for at least six days at the earliest, based on their rural delivery estimate.

That sounds like an Amazon problem. For 40 USD, yubico.com says that it will deliver a shipment on the next business day to this rather rural house I see in the middle of Foothills Road in Newman Lake, Washington.

Also:

> Replacing a key is basically impossible.

If you know that getting next-day delivery is dreadfully difficult, then order a handful to have as spares. "If you can reasonably afford it, always buy more than one." is solid advice for just about every important thing that you are likely to break or lose.

[kotaKat]

> Newman Lake, Washington

You're 21 miles from Spokane. I'm over 120+ north from Syracuse, NY. That's not rural, not one iota. Our Walmart isn't even a Supercenter.

> "If you can reasonably afford it"

I mean, at nearly $40 for shipping and something like $40-50 a key, I'm not sure I can reasonably afford to buy more than one on the average blue collar American IT worker's wage of sub-$30 an hour. If you'd like, I can give you my CashApp for donation purposes?

[simoncion]

> I mean, at nearly $40 for shipping and something like...

As you noted in your original post, next-day shipping is a shipping method so expensive that Amazon only offers it in select locations. An honest reader notes that three-to-seven day shipping is 4 USD, and the one-to-four day rate is 8 USD.

> You're 21 miles from Spokane.

No, I'm zero miles from San Francisco. But all sorts of places offer effectively-next-day shipping to SF, so I had to find somewhere by dragging around on Google Maps.

> I'm over 120+ north from Syracuse, NY.

Okay, is

  Beaver River Air Field, Eagle Bay, NY 13331

sufficiently rural for you? That's ~200 miles from Syracuse as the crow drives and about 90 as the crow flies. If not, how about

  9340 Long Pond Rd, Croghan, NY 13327

or

  Forest Lodge Sports Club, Honnedaga Lake Rd, Cold Brook, NY 13324

?

All of these are still the same price to next-day, one-to-four-day, or three-to-seven-day ship.

[kotaKat]

I'm glad you've wasted that much time trying to argue the shipping factor and I'm glad you get to brag even more that you can afford to live in San Francisco.

I'll take some of your money now, please. I'm scraping together what I can in what some people called "America's Siberia" and am forced to take care of elderly family and have zero escape plan except for working a horribly underpaid IT job here :)

https://cash.app/$meow

[simoncion]

So it is as I said from the outset:

  > Amazon won't deliver one to me for at least six days at the earliest, based on their rural delivery estimate.
  
  That sounds like an Amazon problem. 

But perhaps even 4 USD is too much for you to pay for faster shipping than what Amazon can bother to provide you. If that's the case, then I offer my condolences.