The support hotline will ask you to hold your phone towards the device. It is less error-prone (than a human) and contains more info than a blink code. I find it really clever.

Sure it's clever. But it also means you can't repair the appliance without the manufacturer's server to decode it for you.

Owner of an LG washer that failed here.

All the same diagnostics you can do at the machine, the phone home service allowed a remote engineer to diagnose as well. Things like drum rpm, tilt/knock sensors, uneven balance detection. Instead of paying a human $250 to come out and press buttons, they can do it remotely.

I understand in the pessimistic age of John Deere, all remote diagnostics are bad, but that is not the case here. I was able to do all of the diagnosis myself to determine it was a bad stator and then replace it myself.

How were you able to diagnose it yourself? Just through the error codes, or is there another interface available for non-technicians?

It doesn't require a server, it just requires knowing what the codes mean, same as blinking lights.

Decoding it without help would be difficult for the average consumer, but it's not an impossible task.

They also had a desktop version you could install at home before.

"Hey! I’ve seen this one, this is a classic!" <Marty McFly pointing at screen>

QNX will shift focus in a year or two.

> I don't see why you couldn't expand from parcels to letters;

If they have a state sanctioned monopoly you legally just can't.

Sure, but state enforced monopoly is not a natural monopoly.

"No plaintiff, no judge."

How does the secret jump from the PC to their phone? How do they know each other? ...does the answer involve going all-in on Apple forever?

Your credential manager provides this sync and backup capability. There are dozens of credential managers available that work on all platforms. You don't have to use the default one on any given platform.

Bitwarden is my personal choice.

I still don’t like that I can’t use them on a computer that I can’t download bitwarden on. Library computer, etc.

Passwords I can see myself and make the informed decision to use temporarily somewhere else.

When was the last time you used a library computer, let alone logged onto a private service with it? This was a bad idea even 20 years ago. In today’s security climate, aw hell no.

Or my sisters laptop. & Fairly recently actually, to print something. Most accounts I don’t care that much about & two factor should be enough to save me I hope.

iCloud Keychain (or whatever the Google equivalent is). And as I said, it's a fantastic solution for the vast majority of the population (which, coincidentally, are also not Hacker News readers).

Can you keep access if they decide to shut you down?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42350245

They closed my PayPal account for TOS violation after donating to The OpenBSD Foundation. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.

I don't know how old "letsencrypt-renew" is and what it does. But you run "modern" acme clients daily. The actual renewal process starts with 30 days left. So if something doesn't work it retries at least 29 times.

I haven't touched my OpenBSD (HTTP-01) acme-client in five years: acme-client -v website && rcctl reload httpd

My (DNS-01) LEGO client sometimes has DNS problems. But as I said, it will retry daily and work eventually.

> I don't know how old "letsencrypt-renew" is and what it does.

It's the five lines below "the script:"

I'm sorry mister perfect. I officiously meant "certbot".

I wasn't making fun of you. It wasn't obvious that's what you meant at all, because you said you didn't know "what it does". I'm sure you know what certbot does, so I thought you misinterpreted the post.

Private CAs and CERTs will still be allowed to have longer lives.

This doesn't help that much, since you still have to fiddle with installing the private CA on all devices. Not much of a problem in corporate environments, perhaps, but a pretty big annoyance for any personal network (especially if you want friends to join).

> I doubt anyone is going to MITM my access to an art historian's personal website.

But that is what ISPs did! Injecting (more) ads. Replaced ads with their own. Injecting Javascript for all sorts of things. Like loading a more compressed version of a JPEG and you had to click on a extra button to load the full thing. Removing the STARTTLS string from a SMTP connection. Early UMTS/G3 Vodafone was especially horrendous.

I also remember "art" projects where you could change the DNS of a public/school PC and it would change news stories on spiegel.de and the likes.

They could send real mail to the address with an activate code in it.