Please stop with the acts of war or terrorism BS. The article also mentions “in-store pricing powered by electronic shelf labels” so lets not ignore this is about multi-billion companies trying to suck every penny out of our pocket. If these companies design and manufacture and buy stupid hardware that is susceptible to such hacking, they really deserve it. I mean they really do.
Second, this is a good thing. Systems will be hardened now. You think there would be any other fucking way they would upgrade their security unless something like this happens? Beatings will continue until security improves. This is why even chaotic hackers that cause damage and inconvenience are ultimately a positive force on our IT infrastructure. Think of it as an ecosystem and evolutionary pressure. Free marketplace of security models.
Basically the problem is that Passkeys are designed to allow a particularly bad enshittification once everyone uses them. So it’s not about downsides of using them now, but about them being used in general and then abused.
I like the article and agree with the problem, but I’m skeptical that this works as a strategy to fix the problem. First off, individual responsibility or boycott doesn’t really work. Most people will just use what their phone gives. Second if the corporations do want to do this, they could implement it separately in their apps, like twitter or google chrome requiring quasi-attested “homebrew” passkeys stored in cryptoprocessors. Ultimately I do not think we have any power to prevent them from doing that.
The time of democracy and pluralism is over. We’re already seeing the author of the article being maligned and personally attacked for talking about AI - how dares he? On all fronts we have lost the culture war and lost power, economic power, information power like access to truth.