trynagains
New Member
Passkeys, WebAuthn, FIDO2, and why passwords are a joke
Traditional passwords are garbage because they’re shared secrets. You know it, the website knows it, and the second either side screws up the secret leaks. Yes, passwords are usually stored as hashes, not plaintext, but that’s way less comforting than people think. A hash is just the result of running your password through a one way math function. If the database leaks, attackers get those hashes and then go to work offline where rate limits and lockouts don’t exist. They throw massive wordlists, leaked password dumps, and GPU power at it. Weak passwords get cracked instantly, reused passwords get matched across sites, and even “strong” passwords fall if the hashing algorithm is weak, unsalted, or misconfigured. Rainbow tables, brute force, credential stuffing, and plain old user stupidity all defeat hashed passwords on a regular basis. Hashing is damage control, not real security.Password managers help, but they’re still duct tape on a broken system. You’re still relying on a shared secret that can be tricked out of you or replayed somewhere else. Passkeys fix the core problem by ditching shared secrets entirely. Meso allows passkeys, so use them. They’re built on public key cryptography using WebAuthn and FIDO2. When you register, your device generates a key pair. The public key goes to the forum, the private key stays on your device and never leaves. When you log in, the site sends a challenge, your device signs it with the private key, and the site verifies it with the public key. That’s it. There’s no password to hash, no database of secrets to crack, and nothing useful for an attacker to steal. Phishing pages fail because there’s nothing to type in, and database breaches fail because public keys are worthless on their own.
Hardware keys like YubiKeys take this even further by storing the private key in secure hardware that literally can’t be exported. Malware can’t copy it, browser exploits can’t dump it, and some random asshole across the world can’t log in unless they physically have the device. That’s why attackers hate hardware-backed auth. Biometrics tied to passkeys freak people out but they’re actually simple. Your fingerprint or face scan never leaves your device. It’s just a local unlock for the private key. The forum never sees your biometric data, only a cryptographic signature. And no, someone can’t remotely fake your fingerprint through the screen, that’s not how reality works.
Internet anonymity, ISPs, VPNs, Tor, and why your router rats you out
Your home internet is not anonymous. Your ISP logs metadata like IP addresses, timestamps, and destinations, and yes that’s enough to reconstruct what you were doing. They’re required to keep logs and they will hand them over when asked. A VPN doesn’t make you invisible, it just changes who you’re trusting. Instead of your ISP seeing where you go, the VPN does. That’s still useful because it breaks the direct link to your home connection, but now you’re betting that the VPN doesn’t log, doesn’t get compromised, and doesn’t fold under legal pressure. Tor works differently by spreading trust across multiple relays. Your traffic gets wrapped in layers of encryption and bounced through several nodes. The entry node sees you but not your destination, the exit node sees the destination but not you, and no single relay can tie it all together. That’s not marketing, that’s how the protocol is designed. Tor bridges exist because even using Tor can get you flagged. A bridge is an unlisted entry node that doesn’t advertise itself as Tor, so to your ISP it just looks like normal encrypted web traffic. That doesn’t change the cryptography but it absolutely matters if you don’t want attention before anyone even looks at content.If you’re not a networking nerd, Tails OS is honestly the best option. It’s a live operating system that boots from a USB stick and forces all traffic through Tor at the OS level. Apps cannot bypass it. It runs entirely in RAM and doesn’t touch your hard drive unless you explicitly tell it to. When you shut it down or pull the USB, RAM is wiped and everything disappears. No browser cache, no temp files, no “oops I forgot that app saves logs”. Installing it is straightforward, download it from the official site, verify it, flash it to a USB, boot from USB, do what you need to do, shut down, done. Your normal OS never even loads.
For advanced users, Qubes OS is the hardcore option. It uses virtualization to isolate everything into separate compartments. Browser, email, crypto wallet, random file you downloaded, all separate. Networking is isolated too. Qubes integrates Whonix, which forces Tor routing at the VM gateway level so even a compromised app can’t leak traffic outside Tor. It’s insanely powerful but also unforgiving if you don’t already understand operating systems and networking. If that description sounds intimidating, that’s your sign to stick with Tails.
Crypto anonymity, blockchain transparency, and why Bitcoin snitches
Bitcoin is not anonymous, it’s pseudonymous. The blockchain is public and permanent. Every transaction is visible, timestamped, and linkable. The moment a wallet touches a KYC exchange or gets reused sloppily, it can be tied back to a real person. Chain analysis companies do this professionally and they’re very good at it. Coin mixers try to break transaction links by pooling and redistributing coins, but they’re heavily monitored, sometimes compromised, and sometimes seized. Using one can actually put you under more scrutiny instead of less. Coins designed for privacy do a much better job because the blockchain itself doesn’t leak the data. Monero hides senders with ring signatures, hides recipients with stealth addresses, and hides amounts with confidential transactions. On-chain everything looks uniform and boring, which is exactly what you want. That doesn’t mean magic invincibility, but it means blockchain surveillance mostly fails by design instead of being fought after the fact.Email security, Proton, and not getting socially engineered like a clown
Email is still one of the easiest ways to screw yourself. Mainstream providers like Google scan content, correlate accounts, and comply with data requests as a matter of routine. That’s fine for memes and receipts, not fine for anything legally sensitive. Proton Mail encrypts email at rest and provides end to end encryption between Proton users. Even Proton can’t read your messages without your password since it uses zero access encryption. That doesn’t make you untouchable, but it drastically limits what can be handed over. Most email scams rely on psychology, not hacking. Urgency, fear, authority (as one recent gold medal chemist did on this forum), fake deadlines. “Your account will be closed”, “we hacked your webcam”, “send payment now”. The technical details are usually sloppy if you actually look, weird domains, generic greetings, mismatched links, bad grammar. Extortion emails that include old passwords are almost always recycled breach data meant to scare you into panicking. The right response is to stop reusing passwords or better yet stop using passwords at all, and ignore the threat.At the end of the day security isn’t about being invisible, it’s about raising the cost of targeting you. Most investigations and scams rely on low effort correlation. If you remove easy identifiers, isolate activities, and stop handing your data to companies that monetize it, you force anyone coming after you to work a lot harder than they usually bother to. You don’t need to be a ghost, you just need to stop leaving fingerprints everywhere like a dumbass.
