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Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

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Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand more on the Screen Time issue?

For me it's completely unfit for purpose: * It's incompatible with some apps, e.g. Roblox, that are full-screened, and you end up in an annoying loop between the Roblox screen and the request more time screen fighting with each other, with no ability to click anything. My kid has learned how to hit the Option-Command-Escape shortcut to force-kill Roblox using just the keyboard and restart. * Sometimes Screen Time req…

> * It's incompatible with some apps, e.g. Roblox

Oh this is a good one I forgot. If my kid is playing Roblox and runs out of time, it goes into that screen loop and is impossible to resolve without at least killing Roblox, and sometimes rebooting the silly machine. That's pretty frustrating for the kid for sure, I ended up just whitelisting Roblox so it never happened.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#692
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People can get so irrational when it comes to the cost of software. The same person who'd pay hundreds of dollars for a cleaner, or a gym membership, will swear up and down that 70 bucks a year for an online bodyguard is highway robbery. Often while refusing to work for less than six figures as a SWE, hating on companies for seeking VC funding, dismissing non open-source approaches, and then complaining why there a…

I'm not sure a password database is a 'online bodyguard'. I am sure that 1password has been going downhill for a few years now. Getting rid of the ability for me to manage my own vault was the last straw for me. I'm still limping along with 1password7 with a local vault for my 'important/sensitive' passwords but i let keychain manage most of my randomass website passwords. Since I'm primarily in the apple ecosystem t…

If you're using a version of 1Password that's several years old and no longer updated, and also splitting your passwords across two solutions, one of which is not accessible on all your devices, I'm not too surprised that you don't enjoy the experience.

The current version of 1Password is pretty much seamless for me across Linux, Mac, and iPhone. It's more seamless than it ever was before, honestly. It works for my technical needs and my parents' non-technical needs alike, and greatly simplifies tech support for the latter. I would sincerely recommend giving it a shot if you haven't already.

> I'm not sure a password database is a 'online bodyguard'.

If that's all 1P is, why not just spin up an SQL db yourself? Because, of course, that's not all 1P is. It's a database, a GUI (for five OSes on two architectures, plus web), extensions to auto-fill (and recognise new passwords, or changed passwords) on a range of ever-changing browsers / websites, a great deal of security hardening for their software and servers, an office full of people that evaluate and consider how to combat emerging threat models, etc. None of this is technically impossible to handle yourself, but that's an extremely inefficient allocation of most people's time.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#693
post #263

I want to use this, but this post gave me pause: https://x.com/blader/status/1800263787746066646 "apple sherlocked 1Password today, so i'd like to remind you that your Apple ID is only as secure as your carrier. if you have 2FA on and get SIM swapped, attackers can lock you out of it PERMANENTLY. last month it happened to me. make sure it doesn't happen to you: " Getting locked out of all my passwords would be pretty…

This. I don't think most people realize how much eggs they put into one basket. Every service that can be used for MFA (email, token, password manager) should have its own separate barriers of entry to make total compromise as difficult as possible.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#694
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a problem with the subscriptions. I've tried out a number of options over the years, including KeePass, LastPass, 1Password, and most recently Bitwarden. KeePass was a great bit of software but managing the vault syncing myself and having to wait for (and trust) the third-party Firefox extension to update was tiresome. For about a buck a month, LP was a pretty good deal and handled all of that overhead f…

Development costs money and that's fine, but I don't like it when companies act like their pricing is based on the cost of providing a service, and the service is "syncs a single sub-megabyte file between a few devices". You can get that service a thousandfold for free. (And even if they give you more space, that's a worthless addon to almost all customers.) In particular, the reason it's annoying to sync keepass is…

In your thousands of free services, how do you resolve conflicts in edits done on multiple devices?

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#695
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keychain Access has been there since the beginning of OSX/macOS. It's quietly been storing email and wifi passwords this entire time. Many, before there was an alternative like 1Password, used the app to store other info within as well through secure notes. Passwords in iOS and Safari, along with Keychain sync in iCloud have expanded the keychain functionality over the years and it's been fine for ~25 years or so. I…

Keychain Access has not been "fine". It's had multiple unaddressed data loss bugs. For example, Keychain lost all passwords from all Keychains after the Catalina update[1] and this wasn't fixed in the next 3 Catalina minor updates. Multiple users reported the issue to Apple and the response was crickets. Even if you restored the passwords, it helpfully deleted them all again. I switched to 1Password and declared Keyc…

Depends on how we define "fine," but your own post clarifies that it was "website passwords -- but not app passwords, secure notes, certs, or keys." That's a pretty big difference compared to "all passwords" and seems like it affected a small number of people. In any case, if we're using anecdotes, I haven't had any issues with it so far and it's been decades. Given how 1Password has been getting shittier over time, I've been looking for an alternative, and I for one am going to give this a shot. You can check in with me in a few more decades and ask me if it went okay.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review. Ahhh so you want the public to do your QA for you and don’t mind interfering with their productivity when the first iterations of your software are a buggy mess? I am ok with Apple trying to keep the pests out of their garden, or providing a lockable gate like TestFlight where I can go into…

> Ahhh so you want the public to do your QA for you and don’t mind interfering with their productivity when the first iterations of your software are a buggy mess? "Open source" means developed by the public. The public isn't just doing the QA, they're doing the entire thing from the first line of code. Which is exactly the problem with Apple's interference -- they want you to have a finished app before you can share…

> People will figure this out pretty quickly when they try to use it.

Then you find that it’s uninstallable and you now have a fooked computer where you have to wipe your whole goddamned system to be rid of the POS you just installed. Hopefully you imaged your system right before you DL’d and installed the offending app…so you’ll only lose a few hours instead of a full day this time for your effort. However, you can feel good that you helped “develop” an open source software that almost no one will ever use like the good little netizen you are.

Yeah, no thanks. I’ll take my walled garden and it’s vetted and well behaved apps all day long.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#697
It's good that Apple have decided to improve their offering for password management but a bit overdue and lacking in cross-platform support. Also, it's risky to allow large corporations control over our most sensitive information.

I have been working on solving password management as a local-first, cross-platform, open-source application[1]. It's a bit rough around the edges still (no browser extension yet!) but is worth trying as an alternative. Any feedback would be much appreciated!

The app is designed for zero vendor lock-in (after all this is our most sensitive data) and a self-hosted server is part of the design. We aim to make money offering a cloud platform for syncing and social recovery (digital inheritance) and eventually would like to also function as a Dropbox/Keybase alternative.

We will be releasing the open-source SDK[2] soon.

All comments or suggestions welcome.

[1]: https://saveoursecrets.com [2]: https://docs.rs/sos-sdk/latest/sos_sdk/

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#698
post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Development costs money and that's fine, but I don't like it when companies act like their pricing is based on the cost of providing a service, and the service is "syncs a single sub-megabyte file between a few devices". You can get that service a thousandfold for free. (And even if they give you more space, that's a worthless addon to almost all customers.) In particular, the reason it's annoying to sync keepass is…

In your thousands of free services, how do you resolve conflicts in edits done on multiple devices?

Shouldn't conflict resolution be in the program itself? It should ask me what to do and be able to keep both versions of the conflicting entry. And if I answer "keep both" or defer to later then it should pack both into the vault and upload that.

(Also I didn't mean thousands of free services, I meant that each one will give you thousands of megabytes for free. Honestly just google and microsoft accounts, and icloud with a device, cover just about everyone. But there are a lot of free storage services if you want them.)

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

keepassxc works for me on android, windows, and mac

The very best thing about keepass is that defines a standard and publishes a reference implementation that anyone can build a compatible client for. I like KeepassXC on MacOS and Keepassium on iOS and I keep the DB in sync between them with NextCloud. If I was working on Linux/Android next week I would pick the best clients there and arrange syncing myself, again, without a third party.

And that would be Keepass2Android for Android. I love it, it's perfectly simple and like you, I sync via my own means but there are "easy" options available.

On the desktop there is even a CLI app for interacting with the database, though I also use KeepassXC.

Re: Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way Google's password manager covers websites anywhere I'm logged into Chrome plus native Android apps anywhere I'm logged into Google Play is super convenient though (albeit total lock-in, I won't argue that). Some apps are even developed well enough that a password originally stored via Chrome will be suggested for the app, I guess by cross-referencing the origins in some mutual way. And payment card details wi…

> anywhere I'm logged into Chrome plus native Android apps anywhere I'm logged into Google Play is super convenient though Android's autofill framework is open to everyone to use, and every third-party password manager has a Chrome plugin. I use Bitwarden with exactly this experience, but across Firefox and Chrome and Android.

Interesting! If I used Firefox (et al.) more, and if my passwords stored by Google aren't available there but they would be if stored in Bitwarden, this new-to-me information just might lead me to switch. But I do still intuitively put more trust in Google to not make a mistake; I am ready to be convinced of the opposite, though.
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