The actual AI takeover in action.

We’re never gonna conquer the galaxy like this.

Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security.

From Ars, the same site that was pushing Passkeys really hard (as noted in the linked piece). The readers pushed back against those inane articles, to their credit. I even left a comment, which I hardly ever do anywhere as I just get banned from most places anyway.

Exactly what I predicted would happen did in fact occur because it’s inevitable: Passkeys became another tool for data thieving’ and platform lock-in. It’s wild that anyone (including Ars) thought anything else would or even could occur.

Passkeys are a useless turd.

A curated list and XPI files of Mozilla Firefox browser extensions, addons, themes from addons.mozilla.org, before XUL-based purge blackout.

The removal of the ability to truly have Firefox do what you want was one of the greatest and most senseless (and pointless) eradications of human effort and of useful tools in the history of tech. It also destroyed Firefox and directly led to its irrelevance.

When I recall the things I used to be able to do easily in Firefox that I no longer can achieve in any browser¹, it makes me enraged. And all for no real security or other improvement. Yes, they had to deal with XUL — but instead of creating a better version of that, they took those capabilities away altogether, lied to us that it was for “security” and then laughed at their most devoted users as we said this would doom the browser.

And we were right.

1. Many tasks that I used to complete in seconds now take minutes or hours, if they can be done at all (most cannot).

RIPE says we’re in Germany – so FireFox and Chrome says Guten Tag.

Sites and browsers seem to have no idea to get this right. Even though I am using English as my OS language and browser language, I guess because I’ve searched for enough junk in Spanish and French that Google shows me results in those languages even though I’d prefer English unless I specify otherwise.

And that’s despite not being logged into Google and blocking most things. So it means Google is using my IP to track me enough to toss French and Spanish results my way semi-randomly (I’m not usually behind VPN as it’s too slow for me).

Just give me results in English, please, unless I request something different.

Why do users seem to be mad that simple advice fixes their problems?

I’ve seen this many times over the years. I think there are a few things going on here. Most users are very insecure about their computer abilities, so when you tell them to do something simple and it works they take that as somehow calling them stupid. (Which is insane, but well, you know…users.)

And related to the above, they want some fix to be final and the problem to be fully resolved forever. They want to witness you engaging in an epic bout of troubleshooting where you call Satya Nadella himself and rewrite and recompile the Windows source code just for this one aggrieved user ¹.

Of course, because they do not understand computers and how fantastically, insanely complex they are, explaining to the person experiencing a problem that a reboot or logging out and back in again is the best (and often, only) way to fix a problem they see as you not wanting to do your job ².

So to wrap this up, when you combine insecurity, entitlement and lack of knowledge you end up with anger. Which is one of the many reasons working helpdesk is terrible.

1. Don’t laugh. Or do. But whatever you do, I’ve gotten this exact demand when I was doing support.
2. Another thing more than one lovely user has told me over the years.