Feedback: you need to state very clearly, high up on the page WHY someone would want to use a non-managed solution vs SecretsManager or SSM Parameter Store.
The website has way too much information that is basic credentials store 101. I know why I’d want a secrets manager already.
and if you are targeting users/builders on AWS (which you are implicitly if you can’t run off AWS) you need to be clear as to why anyone would waste time with an unmanaged solution
> a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time.
If you care about your data, you are playing with fire.
Drives do not store data forever. Data must be read and rewritten occasionally to maintain it, from old media past its lifespan to new media.
Good storage software, with the ability to write your data with either mirroring or striping of some sort is able to routinely scan your entire data set and detect bit rot - and rewrite sectors that contain bitrotted data to new media.
You simply do not get that level of protection buying a single external hardrive alone.
Most enterprise storage systems do this. Most cloud storage does this. It’s worth paying for if you have data that is valuable.
Ie they lost money in 2022 when all was said and done.
Also no company that has taken outside money from investors can just give their profits to employees and not share the profits back to the investors.
No investor would ever give money to a company where their share of the profits - which they were duly owed because they took a risk and put money into an enterprise - is not returned to them - and instead shared to employees because it’s the righteous thing to do.
No CEO or CFO would keep their jobs for long if they did this.
I think you’re pointing out a problem which mobile has begun trying to solve - passwords are probably not the right long term solution to authentication for the majority of the population or usecases - the right solution is something more like an automatic biometric scan that doesn’t require remembering anything - just presenting yourself ie. Fingerprint scan, retina scan, faceID etc.
Devices which support these authentication method need to become ubiquitous and their APIs need to be open and widely integrated with, including by web applications and laptop/desktop applications.
There are some hard problems to solve in the way.
You either need to make a central authority that manages the scan data or you need to figure out a way to cryptographically hash the output of a biometric scan such that it can be reliably checked against a stored value in a database. Or perhaps our AI experts on HN could comment on if there is a not too computationally expensive verification method…
But it would be nice. Overtime users could remember less.