My "solution" to this problem is: hardware keys with backups for the really important services—Bitwarden, Google, domain registrar, etc. And then for stuff that isn't absolutely critical, I just use an OTP stored in Bitwarden. As for having both the password and OTP stored in the same place, the way I see it, the OTP is mainly protecting against keyloggers, data breaches, etc. And then I figure, if someone gets into my Bitwarden account, I'm already fucked anyway, so it's whatever.
I currently have four Yubikeys: one on my keychain, one in my apartment, one to take with me while traveling, and one at my parents' house. I figure this should be adequate to ensure I never get locked out of Bitwarden or Google, which would be an utter disaster.
I suppose it is determined by where you set the bar, even more so with privacy which still varies person-to-person and can sometimes take a qualitative feel.
Security wise, there is interesting work adopting MLS (and I believe key transparency) under Matrix, see https://arewemlsyet.com for example.
Yes, but I think that's a poor choice of words; those are not the same thing. There are lots of smart people who are not independent, self-directed, or hard working! My manager was just saying to me yesterday, "we need smart people who know how to get shit done—just hiring smart people isn't enough."
They went into detail about what they were talking about, making it clear what they meant. What more do you want, new made-up words so no one can argue that this specific word has multiple definitions (as ALL words do)?
Good suggestion, but where and how does HA receive callbacks? I would guess that almost all HA instances are behind residential LANs and most aren't accessible on the public internet. You could use dynamic DNS and forward ports, but that's flaky, you might run into CGNAT, etc. And anyway, it's best if your HA instance isn't publicly addressable; mine is only accessible over my personal WireGuard VPN and I intend to keep it that way.
I'm sure this is a solvable and solved problem, but I do believe it is non-trivial, and potentially a major headache for a company to implement just to support a tiny niche of users. I'd be delighted to find out I'm wrong though!
And, unfortunately, the business case isn't there, since this weakens lock-in effects. I don't endorse this reason—that's why I run my own HA instance and don't buy or use any products that require the cloud or otherwise can't be operated entirely locally (including flashing Valetudo to my robot vacuum!).
If you pay for the home assistant cloud subscription (built into HA, ~5 USD/mo) they can provision custom callback URLs for you so you don’t have to expose your HA instance. I have this setup for certain integrations such as Samsung Smart Things.
It’s not a perfect solution since it costs money but it’s a nice alternative to exposing your HA instance or some other front end proxy to the internet.
Unfortunately it's not actually that different in effect -- Nabu Casa proxy the encrypted TCP connection, rather than terminating TLS and proxying HTTP, which is great for privacy but not so much for providing an extra layer of security on top of HA itself.
It is also much easier for those without easy access to extra static IP addresses. Given the target audience I think it's probably the right approach.
I don't think it's entirely devoid of security improvements---you need to know the webhook address in order to get access to talk to a HA instance which would be a lot more difficult than just port scanning for an open (perhaps unpatched) HA instance on the open internet. I would still prefer it though if things would expose a local API or speak MQTT however.
Open a TCP connection from the instance to the cloud service. I don't know about all consumer routers, but I just checked mine and the default TCP established timeout is 7440 seconds. Idle timeouts are supposed to be at least 2 hours.
If you served the entire US (130 million households) and had a 1 hour keepalive, that's only 36k packets per second, which is nothing.
You could also auto-train the idle timeout by using a pair of TCP connections. One uses a known good value while the other probes upwards until it finds its connections start getting closed (with some optional binary search fanciness), feeding new known good values back to the first.
MQTT is the solution for this. Note that the garage door openers talk MQTT to the myq service (over TLS with preshared keys). It should be possible to subscribe to events from your garage door opener(s) and also to send commands to it.
but MQTT alone doesn't solve the challenge for some Internet server to push messages to a Home Assistance instance running inside a home network / behind a router / behind a firewall / NAT unless a port is opened on the router, or long-polling is used.
Oh wow, this is laudably frank in my opinion. They are quite up front about the motivation behind this change. Two relevant excerpts:
> Over the last year or two Matrix has evolved from ‘explosive growth’ to being a ‘category’ in its own right. In other words, ‘Matrix-based’ is now specified as a requirement in massive public and private sector tenders - in which multinationals compete to provide Matrix-based products and services.
and
> Today we have arrived at a crossroads. We have succeeded in making Matrix wildly successful, but Element is losing its ability to compete in the very ecosystem it has created. It is hard for Element to innovate and adapt as quickly as companies whose business model is developing proprietary Matrix-based products and services without the responsibility and costs of maintaining the bulk of Matrix. In order to be fair to our customers, we need to be able to put more focus on them and their specific requirements.
So basically, Element can't compete with other companies for the contracts that only exists because of Element's work, because the other companies can focus just on making proprietary extensions for code that Element has more or less the sole burden of maintaining. So Element is saying to those companies, hey, either AGPL your modifications and extensions (AGPL is relevant since if you're running eg sidecar services with Synapse or Dendrite, this will still hit those sidecar services), or pay for a license for our code. This seems fair to me, to be honest.
And yeah, I understand people's moral objections to the CLA, but it's necessary for Element's strategy to work. And maybe I'm naive but I do believe Element and the team have Matrix's best interests at heart, they're just also grappling with making money and being self-sustaining, and so I hope that they succeed in that for the sake of the broader Matrix project and ecosystem.
This change also does not seem likely to me to affect open-source work or the broader Matrix community for the most part. If you want to self-host a Matrix server this shouldn't change anything for you. All the code you're running is already open-source, you don't need to do anything. Matrix as a protocol and an ecosystem of servers and clients and users won't be affected by this, just companies selling services that are based on Element's open-source code.
And protocol governance hasn't changed, it's still in the hands of the Matrix Foundation, and this won't change that. And you can say, hey, Matrix protocol development has always been driven by Element and its priorities and interests—yes, that's absolutely true. But this change won't affect that either! And in fact, if the CLA pushes pushes community development efforts away from Synapse/Dendrite and toward other projects like Conduit[0], then this might even be good for the ecosystem and community governance by decreasing Element/Synapse's influence over the direction protocol, which I'd be happy to see.
So yeah, as someone who is self-hosting Synapse and really rooting for an open, free, community-centric Matrix protocol to succeed, I'm not heartbroken over this change. I'm actually even a bit hopeful about what it means for Element and Matrix going forward.
I have settled on exactly the same setup! It's pretty great. My right-hand monitor is a terminal 24/7. My center monitor is code—I used to think I'd want vertical for code, and it is nice sometimes, but at my current job I benefit from having several files open side-by-side more than I benefit from seeing more of one file. It's a 4k monitor and I have it fractionally scaled so that I can read comfortably, but I can also fit up to four files side-by-side on the screen at once. It is very useful. And then the laptop screen is for Slack, docs, AWS dashboard, whatever is useful at the time.
I use the right hand monitor for slack and documentation. Sometimes a terminal, very occasionally code that I’m reading (not writing).
I also used to think is want a portrait monitor for code but it turns out that the Jack of horizontal resolution actually bothers me for code. Maybe with a higher resolution monitor it would be better, but for now, I prefer to use a large but landscape monitor for code.
Be that as it may, their object-level behavior is still far less shady. And in fact this is an argument that it is good that they exist, because in the counterfactual world where they don't, their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information.
I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse.
All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.
> their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information
I look at it a slightly different way.
Absent the vertical integration, they wouldn't dominate the market.
Absent dominating the market, they wouldn't wield as many resources.
Absent as many resources, they wouldn't have been able to build a panopticon in the first place.
And even if there were excesses in an alternate world... there would be a market of competitors, which would encourage different behavior.
And possibly even (gasp!) regulation because of the worst excesses.
Instead, FAANG wield vast resources, culled from entrenched monopoly positions, and act just responsible enough (plus lobbying) to avoid regulation.
Yes, this is a textbook parasocial relationship. No judgment—me too. I've been listening to the "New Heights" podcast a lot recently, so my most recent parasocial relationship is feeling like Jason and Travis Kelce are my friends. Of course I know they're not, it's just how these things work. Parasocial relationships are ubiquitous in the modern day.
My favorite analogy is that parasocial relationships are the Doritos of socialization: appealing. delicious, addictive, can temporarily keep hunger at bay—but fundamentally not satiating, lacking in essential nutrients, and unhealthy when they displace their original natural & more nutritious alternatives.
It's kind of inescapable in modern politics, because it's effective at getting people elected and/or making money. It's not the worst way to get elected; certainly better than relying on narrow donor class money. Just .. recognize the limitations of it.
I’m inclined to agree. The problem is, unlike High School where the kids just grow the fuck out of all the stupid teenage bullshit, adults seem to not have that kinda structure going on.
So instead of being a Rogan stan for those weird years in High School, you are grown ass 30 year year old Stan who’s been stanning for 5 years now minimum.
Adults today don’t know how to snap out of the high school shit they easily snapped out of after high school. It’s like we’re in a high school that never ends.
I don't think that's "adults today". Adults in the past also had parasocial shit going on. Do you think the people banging on Sherlock Holmes's author feeling personally betrayed by the ending were all young kiddos?
I think the issue with being an adult is that you often think you've outgrown childish inclinations. In actuality, I find adults will act childishly and then assume, because they are adults, their behavior must be mature and taken seriously.
It sounds like Mastodon. Or at least, that was my experience with it. People do find you quite easily via the Local Timeline, and engagement tends to be much higher and more authentic even with lower numbers. Just be sure to stay away from the drama.
I currently have four Yubikeys: one on my keychain, one in my apartment, one to take with me while traveling, and one at my parents' house. I figure this should be adequate to ensure I never get locked out of Bitwarden or Google, which would be an utter disaster.