Last week or two I've been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I'll take the crypto.

Long time ago a friend of mine used a set of key press to generate a smiley face to put in his bios which ended up in a situation where he was not able to type in the same smiley face into the password prompt. I had to teach him to reset his bios battery to get back into the bios.

this feeeels like the stupidest idea ive ever heard.. its not like theres really an emojii standard applied as universally as text, across devices or applications... the transforms that happen... this seems fraught with terribleness

am i missing something?

Grab a sentence you know well.

Pick just the first letter of each word.

It will look like it's random - for example "I like my lemmy only with beans and bacon" becomes "ilmlowbab" - and it comes from a far vaster possibility space (ever possible sentence and it need not even make sense) than that of "words in the English language and derived words" so it's a lot harder to try to crack with a dictionary attack.

Also it works in everything that takes ASCII charactes (i.e. everything but numeric only pin codes).

I wonder how often curse words or obscure slang are included in dictionary attacks.

Anyone who takes any kind of advice from the fucking New York Post deserves what they get.