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No 'crypto will replace fiat currency!!!' type content will ever actually lead to the general public understanding what cryptography _is_. it also leads to a distrust of the term. If i explain a passkey as as 'photographically secured login method,' many are going to think 'blockchain.'

And if my first reaction to something is 'blockchain' my bullshit alarms also go of instantly. Hell, I know about proper cryptography and feel like that every time I deal with the term!

The other part is the societal scale shunning of curiosity. This is not really a problem of individuals, but more of our education system (often intentionally!) pushing against it. Don't ask to many questions, just learn for the test. If you don't do what we tell you, you'll be unemployed for life.

People are simply conditioned to not ask many questions. Don't bother asking why passkeys, or why passwords and emails. Just do as your told. Of course, with it being a whole lot of bogus 'just do as i say' people do so with minimum effort. And aren't happy about it.

That's how you get 'Pasw0rd!' and such things. The rules are just given, no explanation, and compliance is expected without understanding. So people put minimum effort. And at the same time you get conditioned to be intellectually lazy about these things!

I feel its quite easy to blame people for that, but they shouldn't be! Its very quick and emotional to go and think 'they could just google this, just read and article, just _learn_ it!'! But consider: as mentioned above, our society _punishes_ this!

And this doesn't just go for passkeys. this goes for green energy, public transit, economics, medicine, politics, everything! Don't ask questions, just do what your told. Its a deeply ingrained part of fascism to do this. To make people not ask questions!

To condition people to never ask 'why', or worse 'is that even true?' Who would vote Trump if they actually checked what he says and if his reasoning is right? THAT is why, especially in the US - but also the world in general - fascists have been trying to make us incurious!

And while the cause is institutional, getting _better_ is personal. Changing the education system to one that encourages inspection and introspection, only effects those still going through it! Adults - who were raised into this - need to change _ourselves_!

But of course that's no simple matter either. Time is a problem for many, and a lack of good learning resources is as well! That doesn't mean you can't do anything. To those who may find themselves here a little now:

Every little bit counts. maybe you come by stuff on your way to work you don't know much about. Google them, read a Wikipedia article on the topic. Try to find out why they are there! What does this sign mean? Whats this pond for? Those buildings over there, whats in there?

Dig deeper on that news post you just saw. Learn to identify common plants or bird song! Hell, learn about how they make the movies you watch! How do they cook that? Why do they build it like this?

Question whatever you see and don't know about! It'll be hard at first, and you'll probably find that some of those things are boring to you! But I promise you, you _will_ find something you love to learn about. It also gets easier!

So much of learning - and science - is not the details of the topic, but the way we do it. The way we know things, the way we reason about stuff, and that's the _hard_ part. Remembering numbers and facts is easy, just write them down!

And that's why reading and learning is hard. The what is easy, the why is not. But the _why_ matters a lot more! What is a passkey, to come back to that? A cryptographic key that lets a website authenticate you.

A whole lot of easy to remember information that's utterly useless. Why do it like that, and not with passwords? What does most of that even mean! You could learn that sentence in a minute, doesn't help though.

In simple, useful terms: A passkey is like a password, but no one can possible guess it, and it also makes sure you don't accidentally share it with someone you shouldn't. The point is to be more secure, and a little more convenient then password.

You might mistake a phishing site for the real thing and type in your password. But no matter what, it won't look real enough to fool you're browser into giving it the passkey.

Also, please, use a password manager! It also helps with sites that don't have passkeys at all! And most passkey apps also have passwords as well! And they make your passkeys available on _all_ your devices! Instead of just the one you made the key on! And you only need to know one secure password!

All the other ones your password manager knows for you! And if you're worried about that password manager - and the company behind it getting your password, don't! They are end to end encrypted, meaning only _you_ ever know them!

Oh and please, for the sake of my sanity, for the password manager use a real, good password! I recommend using a passphrase: don't know what that is? Many of you might not! I recommend looking it up on Wikipedia, the article is quite good, if a bit technical.

If you have the time, I'd recommend clicking around the linked articles for anything you don't get, and see where you end up! Maybe you'll learn something about entropy and randomness along the way. Or what NIST does. All sorts of fun stuff!

Also: webp is pretty great, actually. Well, minus the part where way to many applications refuse it for no good reason. And the part where google killed jpegxl to keep webp despite jpegxl being better. But that's the tech worlds fault and not the users. Seriously, how do apps still not do webp...