321–330 of 350 posts
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Do they really disable paid-up numbers if nothing connects to them for a year?
With pay as you go they do. Usually six months. Paying more in resets the timer.
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Problem is that support people mistakenly resetting account auth when the attacker calls up and social engineers them is a bigger and more common issue than people’s only device dying. Not to say that’s not a thing that happens, but it’s a smaller of the two problems.
It's a smaller of the two problems for the company . If you are really poor, losing access to your online life because you couldn't pay your phone bill or something can be a huge, huge problem. I have been homeless. I'm not currently. But this is an extremely stressful situation that could do all kinds of damage to my life if I can't get it sorted.
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It's pretty tone-deaf to tell someone who's posted about being poor and previously homeless that they should have to pay Google $500 to recover their account.
Honestly to be expected here. I opened up about my own homelessness while being employed in my field of study for over 20 years. I received a bunch of vitriol and downvotes for my honesty. If ever you need a reminder that you are surrounded by "anarcho-capitalists" just scroll through any HN comments field pertaining to the intersection of ethics and the economy.
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I tried to sign up for a tutanota email account the other day through a VPN and when it came back and said "We don't trust your IP, use another connection." rather than being annoyed I was just glad they gave me a straight answer for once. It wasn't the answer I wanted but it sure beat being gaslighted into thinking I was having connection timeouts or browser incompatibilities to waste my time.
It's a straight answer sufficiently couched in jargon that a non-technical person still isn't likely to understand the problem or how to resolve it.
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I'm sure plenty of people would rather live with the small chance of a hacker even wanting to gain access to their account than the very large chance of eventually losing access to the account entirely.
Although they probably wouldn't want to live with all their emails being discarded because gmail becomes so easy to hack and everyone assumes gmail accounts are spammers.
There was a post a while back around poor and homeless people encountering exactly this problem on a regular basis. Lots of people in the comments were incredibly dismissive and sometimes actively malign about it. Edit: One suggestion from me would be to try and start the dead phone connected to power but with the battery physically removed (assuming it's removable). That might bypass whatever issue it's having and l…
Is there anything I can do to help poor and homeless people with technology? I'm in New Zealand and I would like to find some more ways to help people.
I wrote a piece called So You Want to do a Website to Help the Homeless that might interest you: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2020/05/so-you-want...
The local police department does -- or did at one time -- pass out flyers I made listing online resources for the homeless and there is an edited version of those flyers here: http://www.eclogiselle.com/2020/10/free-and-custom-flyers-as...
I tried to establish some kind of homeless smartphone project. It never went anywhere. If you want to read what little I did as food for thought for what you might do, you can start here: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/04/project-hom...
If tech is your thing, coolios. Run with that. Better to do something than to do nothing.
But if you really want to make a dent in homelessness, my research suggests that this is mostly a housing supply/housing affordability issue. We aren't building enough new housing and what we do build tends to be too big and tends to require a car to make life work, which is an additional big expense and -- at least for some people -- a logistical issue even if they had the money. Some handicapped people simply don't drive. Some seniors simply don't drive anymore. Etc.
So if you really want to work on homelessness, I would encourage you to educate yourself about housing issues in your neck of the woods and try to get involved. I write about my ideas about what I would like to see for the US here if you want to look that over: https://projectsro.blogspot.com/
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>This is why I will not use 2FA except on services where it is absolutely required Software 2FA just computes a number based on a secret string. You treat the latter the same way you take care of your passwords. That's why it's best to handle them with your password manager. 2FA over SMS is even less of an issue (except maybe with a broken eSIM chip). Physical methods are a problem, so you have to spend money for a b…
SMS is a much bigger issue if you are in another country, temporarily lose access to your phone, or work in a building without phone reception. It's prone to SIM swaps and could be intercepted by other apps on your phone. It requires having a fixed, serviced phone number, which people don't always have: children, homeless people and recent immigrants might struggle with that. All of these scenarios happened to me, an…
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It's pretty tone-deaf to tell someone who's posted about being poor and previously homeless that they should have to pay Google $500 to recover their account.
Honestly to be expected here. I opened up about my own homelessness while being employed in my field of study for over 20 years. I received a bunch of vitriol and downvotes for my honesty. If ever you need a reminder that you are surrounded by "anarcho-capitalists" just scroll through any HN comments field pertaining to the intersection of ethics and the economy.
But people here seem a bit less threatened by very poor individuals actually posting here than in most online places. I know from my own experience that mentioning you're homeless is usually a red rag to a bull. Add that you're an unemployed software developer, and the self-loathing middle class is often very quickly off on a hate-rampage. Less so here, for some reason. Perhaps just because people here are focused on topics of common interest, so if you're a loser (generally hated by the winners, worried that by the grace of providence they might have been you ..), at least you're one of our losers?