21–30 of 149 posts
Yahoo! Japan, One of the most famous website in Japan, forces users to use insane auth method: SMS 1FA. It even accepts phone number as login ID. This is really stupid.
I've spent countless hours trying to explain them the issue in 2019 and gave up as nobody cared.
Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?
Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?
Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?
Conversely, the lack of such generous SMS allotments in most non-US countries drove widespread adoption of WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/etc.
My bank (USAA) decided to switch their 2FA away from SMS a while ago. They only do email or the USAA app auth code. I love it and I feel much safer with them because of it. Let's do start to move away - yes!
Email is much worse than SMS.
If your control your own receiving server then it would be hard for someone to intercept the message.
Do writers on it know that you can only read 3 articles before you are required to create an account and login? (like pinterest)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the SIM porting attacks, where telco employees are vulnerable to being socially engineered to letting an attacker port your phone number over to another device. Also this new attack, which is more stealthy.
But that is not really true for most countries. In my country, to get a sim ported you need to go to the shop and present your identification.
Of course that's several orders of magnitudes harder to do than just finding a leaked password somewhere, so it's still nice to have SMS as 2FA compared to nothing. It'll stop the mass bots.
So, I work in telecom and dabble a bit in software. I don’t understand the hatred for SMS 2FA on HN. Can someone explain to me why SMS is such a bad method comparative to other solutions where the practical user adoption is near impossible at scale? At some point, software is going to need to bend to the way people work. When does that happen instead of obsessing over ubiquitous “zero trust”. I’d love a parable of ho…
This has bitten me a few times, sometimes in desperate situations. Like when I've needed to log in to Airbnb to message a host, transfer some cash from my bank account, access my frequent flyer account, etc. Far too many sites don't provide 2FA over email, or through an app like Google Authenticator - they can only do it over SMS.
Yeah, I know I could set up roaming. But it's an easy thing to forget, since I change phone numbers every couple of years (for both personal and work phones). And it's not always cheap.
It's also just a huge pain to have to go through and change every account I have, any time I change numbers. A lot of accounts that I only use occasionally are configured with one of my many old phone numbers, which don't work anymore. This usually involves a call to tech support to fix it.
Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?
Not all people have or want smartphones.
Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?