Edit: I just got back in! I had to give a real phone # for the SMS step. It pretended to accept a Google Voice # but would never send a code and I just got stuck in the loop I describe below. I've now closed the account. Oh, the irony... Yup, I've got an old gmail account that Google won't let me into. First I get: "This device isn’t recognized. For your security, Google wants to make sure it’s really you." With opti…
Ask HN: Gmail account security
291–300 of 807 posts
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean IMAP and SMTP protocols, right?
I mean an api like mailgun
We (Fastmail) are set up for human-to-human emails rather than bulk mailing, so if you try to do bulk mailing you're likely to hit limits and possibly terms of service issues - if you're trying to do the kind of thing that people use mailgun for, then I'd recommend using something like mailgun instead!
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the user-agent, it is definitely doing non-trivial fingerprinting (both linked projects also had UA mitigations before). We don't have an easy workaround (besides a sketchy cookie hack that took hours to reverse engineer) right now and have been trying to get in touch with them.
> it is definitely doing non-trivial fingerprinting Can confirm. To generalize and understand why, big corps have to deal with an insane amount of (often automated) abuse, so they build profiles using data collection to assess your risk level. Being in the wrong cohort (say unusual browser, small country, rare language, use a vpn etc) can affect your score. Basically it's these massive bayesian filters that output ho…
In my book you’re never supposed to fully block a session because of the score, there needs to be a (potentially burdensome) way to prove the score wrong. Blocking a browser should be out of question.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#294They also do this thing now where they block [1] smaller browsers (even ones using the latest version of chromium) under the guise of security. According to their docs they're fighting MITMs by generally disallowing any browser they can't identify (so the big few). If you're not on a whitelisted browser by Google, you can't log in (effectively, use) any of their properties. This feels very anti-competitive to me. Not…
Please dont post links to programs that arent even publicly available.
One of the most discussed projects on HN in the past year or so has been GPT-3 which is (was?) pretty hard to get access to.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#295They also do this thing now where they block [1] smaller browsers (even ones using the latest version of chromium) under the guise of security. According to their docs they're fighting MITMs by generally disallowing any browser they can't identify (so the big few). If you're not on a whitelisted browser by Google, you can't log in (effectively, use) any of their properties. This feels very anti-competitive to me. Not…
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#296Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
2022 me agrees with you, but 2003 me getting an invite to GMail when it was a brand new service and essentially a completely different company with a different landscape didn't know better. Now I have nearly two decades of accounts and things tied to GMail =(
Google Takeout is a pretty nice service still. It's good to back up your accounts regularly.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#298Fortunately this was a secondary email address, and my primary email was on my own domain.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#299The one that I run into sometimes: in order to do "Find My Phone" for my wife's phone, I try to sign in as her. In order to 2FA authenticate, I need to press yes on her (lost) phone, or answer a phone call or text on her (lost) phone. What exactly is the point of a find phone feature that requires you to have the phone?
Apple doesn't have this issue BTW; they have some 2FA stuff but Find My iPhone is excluded so you can use it if your phone is missing.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security
#300I signed into an old Gmail account of mine that had a bitcoin private key backup. After signing in successfully, I searched for "bitcoin private key" in Gmail. Within a second and before the search completed, I was immediately kicked out of all active sessions, and my account was locked.