Holylander

Sweden turns out quite strange of a country for the 21st century, reminds me of the USSR in late 80s:

- The situation is bad, real bad, but no one publicly acknowledges that;

- The government, instead of taking unpopular and painful but needed steps to try and handle the problem, makes itself "don't see any problem, our people are happy";

- By all European standards the policy is a mistake, but no one in office steps forward and says so, they rather play to the tune of "we can't see any problem, public opinion of the government is quite high". Kinda of asking to play louder the band on the Titanic.

- Swedes keep on "trusting the government to do what they do as they know better", while it is unclear on what their trust is based.

- To outsiders, this attitude of all sides involved sort of means "we accepted 'the devil take the hindmost' philosophy as we want to keep our daily happy about routine unchanged, so be it". Again, as I said - typical thinking of USSR of 80s. It didn't end well.

Either only few phones had SMS as MFA or SMS swapping wasn't used at all. The later is more logic:

- You have to have a physical/esim card which costs money to buy and is perfectly Geo-trackable.

- You can only SIM-swap by duping any given cellular operator in personal interaction with their Support. Article says US & Europe - different countries, different mobile operators. Each such call is recorded, costs air time money, again Geo locates the caller.

What is more probable - yet another stupid malware was installed on phones, which can easily read Device ID/SMS received. In such case, great that Trusteer busted this operation (I guess, no mentioning of LE involved), but nothing news-worthy in technological sense. So, it is still better to have SMS as MFA versus no MFA at all, and of course it is time to switch to Authenticaiton Apps for MFA/Hardware keys.

Thanks for the pointer, I was exactly asking myself "Was it written like in 90s?" Today the problem is too much information, not not enough of it.

Clickbait verging on the fake news - they took piece of information completely out of the context and baked a "sensation". No, Tutanova does NOT install "backdoor" be it a court order or not. Government or else can only read contents of non-encrypted mails and only metadata of the encrypted mails, it has been so ever since and this is the way the email works. Clarification in plain English here https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/k3sfs5/in_englisc...

Disjointed story - if MacBooks were replaced, "money not an issue" - what are you complaining about then ? Why write this sobbing tale?

The story lost credibility with me the moment I saw that all his "stolen" goods list he put with affiliate links to Amazon :) ...