Comment by Dylan16807
1 month ago
> That's why full disk encryption was always a no-go for approximately all computer users, and recommending it to someone not highly versed in technology was borderline malicious.
Do you feel equally strongly about people using drives that can fail? Is selling a computer without redundant drives also borderline malicious?
> In the real world, there is always a recovery path.
To accounts there is. But data gets lost all the time.
> Do you feel equally strongly about people using drives that can fail? Is selling a computer without redundant drives also borderline malicious?
No. Drives wear out and fail, like all hardware. Much like the compressor in your fridge, or V-belt in your car, you can extend the service life of your drive through proper care, and replace it when it fails to keep the system running. And in practice, hard drives are reliable enough that, with typical usage patterns, most people don't need RAID).
And, much like with fridges and cars, computers and their parts are subject to both market forces and (in more civilized places) consumer protection laws, which ensure computer hardware meets the usual, reasonable expectations of the common person.
> To accounts there is. But data gets lost all the time.
Data loss still happens, which kind of proves my point - computers are hard, and normal people can't even be expected to back things up properly. That's why every commercial PC and mobile OS vendor these days is pushing automated off-site backups using their cloud offerings. Might not be ideal, and even might be a tad anti-competitive, but it's a good deal for 99% of the users.
But this brings me back to my other pet peeve: 2FA, via authenticator apps, passkeys, and other such things that tie your credentials to a device via magic crypto keys. These crypto keys are data, and given how tech companies get away with having no actual customer support, 2FA ends up turning data loss into account access loss.
Mandatory 2FA is a trap, a time ticking bomb, because it's way too easy to make a mistake and lose the keys - and if the backend follows the current High Security Standards, this is irreversible even from the vendor side.
Compare that to expectations people have about the real world - if you lose all your keys to your home or your car, you... just go to a locksmith and show some plausible proof of ownership, and they'll legally break in and replace the locks for you. If you can't produce a plausible proof of ownership, you involve police in the process. And so on. There's always a recovery path.
> And in practice, hard drives are reliable enough that, with typical usage patterns, most people don't need RAID
And most people aren't going to forget a password they put in almost every day that never changes. I don't see why that kind of full disk encryption is so bad.