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by mhurron 6 days ago
> These are all answerable questions, but getting those answers is confusing for most people.

It's the same answer when someone asks 'how am I supposed to have a different password for every site' and 'how am I supposed to remember a password of X+ characters.' Use a password manager. Pretty sure every major one supports passkeys by now.
4 comments
cpburns2009 6 days ago
So passkeys achieve nothing if you can already use strong, secure, random passwords stored in a password manager?
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AlexandrB 6 days ago
Password managers for passkeys have a huge problem when dealing with any kind of remote support or working on someone else's hardware - you can't just copy/paste or type in the passkey so you're forced to install the password manager on a family member's/stranger's/employer's PC or do what? I'm not even sure. At least SSH keys have forwarding when you ssh to a remote machine, how do you "forward" a passkey?
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nozzlegear 6 days ago
With Apple's Passwords app, you can create "groups" for passwords and passkeys and share them with people. Once shared, the passkey/password automatically fills as if it was that person's own.

I have a "Family" group in my Passwords app where I share passwords and passkeys with family members for exactly this purpose.

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fhdkweig 6 days ago
Write it down on a sheet of paper and put the paper in a safe place. As a bonus, I can have multiple copies in multiple places. It is simple, easy, and I have been doing it all my life. I see no reason why it has to be more complicated than that.
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TeMPOraL 6 days ago
Password managers are themselves cross-device footguns and I could easily write the same headline for them myself. I've been working in tech for 20 years now, and I don't use them.

ETA: Well I do use auto-fill in browsers/mobile, but funny thing about this, I have three running on my phone[0], they all activate at the same time, and they contain mostly non-overlapping set of credentials, and I got tired of trying to sync them together, so I just look up passwords manually one by one in each and use clipboard to transfer the credential once I find it.

And I had to stop using passkeys because they interact with this split-brain system in unpredictable ways.

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[0] - Specifically: Google Password Manager / Google Autofill / whatever they call it, Samsung Pass / Samsung Wallet (they're sort of but not the same?), and auto-fill built into Firefox.

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