Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

Re:Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access ... by jakelazaroff on Friday October 07, 2022 @10:11AM (#33121592)

I don't have one. I'm not a security expert or researcher or anything like that. But the tech industry has invented thousands of things that to most people would have been inconceivable beforehand. That doesn't mean there's a way to improve on the tradeoffs we have now — but the fact that no one's invented it yet doesn't mean it can't exist.

The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in the world, who try to solve the hardest problems. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't throw our hands up when we can't immediately come up with a solution to something we only learned about five minutes ago.

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Re:Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access ... by Arainach on Friday October 07, 2022 @10:29AM (#33121840)

This isn't something we learned about five minutes ago. It's been known that people lose their phones for a very long time. The tradeoffs were considered when designing the system.

Treating the tech industry as a magical black box that can "solve anything" is disingenous and dangerous. This is the exact same attitude that leads to things such as legislation that says "find a way for any communication to be decrypted upon subpoena. You're tech people, figure it out"

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Re:Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access ... by b3morales on Friday October 07, 2022 @12:04PM (#33123168)

> The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in the world, who try to solve the hardest problems.

I think this is a good point, but the catch is that there's an implicit footnote that needs to be attached to "the hardest problems*": "*Which generate sufficient monetary returns". This particular problem isn't one that has much revenue potential.

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