121–130 of 328 posts
Sounds like discrimination of a broad group of people. Granted, it's not a designated protected group, like by national origin, but I still think they have a good chance in court.
On what grounds?
She just needs a microcell/femtocell. Talk to your provider, explain to them you get poor service at your home or place of work, and they'll send you a free Internet-in cellular-out radio AP. She doesn't need a tower-based booster if she's got fiber/cable/DSL, those only serve to amplify weak signals and she's too many miles and too many mountain ridges away from the nearest tower, she wants something with RJ-45 inpu…
I'm surprised the major cell providers are cool with letting randos operate cell towers that back into an unknown untrusted ISP and their customers will automatically switch to when in range. It's unbelievably chill for companies that are usually so concerned about their image and controlling the whole experience end to end.
Google Fi can receive all SMS 2 factor messages on Wi-Fi including short codes. It doesn't even require that your phone is on, you can get them in any web browser on any device even if your phone is destroyed. One of my favorite features. You can get service starting at $20 per month. Fi used to have good service in some mountain areas too, with US Cellular. Not sure what's going on with US Cellular right now though.…
The last time I checked if you wanted "cellphone is off" texting/voice (basically the old hangouts), you had to enable "fi syncing" which disabled rcs features. Is that still true? What url do you goto to do texts/voice? (i see hangouts.google.com redirects to google chat).
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It really is absurd that the same companies that won’t allow 2FA with any other method outside of SMS are the same ones not sending to VoIP. Maybe they all go through a service for SMS that blocks it, but it still upsets me. It’s insane to me that maybe every bank I use requires SMS 2FA, but random services I use support apps.
I absolutely cannot stand that no bank I have (US) supports generic TOTP, which is more secure and easier to recover from backup if my phone is broken or stolen. It's inexcusable.
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My personal 2FA favorite is OTP + authenticator app. It behaves predictably and doesn’t have weird failure conditions. SMS 2FA tied to your mobile number sucks if it doesn’t support Google Voice, especially when traveling internationally and your SIM card isn’t in your phone. Email 2FA usually works, but I just find it annoying. App-specific push notifications mostly work, but it’s hard to debug if you don’t get the…
TOTP isn't phishing-resistant, which is the whole ballgame. I've had the job of working on authentication for highly-targeted mass-market systems, and code-generators basically don't work: they raise the bar on phishing attacks to a level phishers still easily meet.
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Food doesn't come from remote mountainous areas. Farm fields may not have cell service but living way out there isn't required even for farmers. I grew up on a farm so it's funny when people on the internet try to educate me about farms as if I've never heard of them.
>Food doesn't come from remote mountainous areas. I must be imagining the farms that I pass in the mountains in the middle of nowhere when I go backpacking. Surely your argument isn't, "My farm was here, so it's impossible for other farms to be in different locales"?
> other options available to her include > port her cellphone number to a VOIP provider that does support receiving SMS from shortcodes over wifi That's generally a great solution – unless the company she's dealing with is one of those that don't send SMS-OTP codes to VoIP numbers for seCuRiTy reasons, or demand that the number is somehow "registered in her name" (which many smaller carriers apparently don't do). I r…
I can probably illuminate some things here. This is almost certainly the SMS API they're using. Your phone, and your network by extension, does not care if the phone is technically online - so those messages get received because they're literally sending in the blind (and if the recipient is offline, the message gets temporarily stored by the receiving carrier for around 3-7 days before it is discarded).
These SMS OTP systems validate "reachability" (using APIs like https://developer.vonage.com/en/number-insight/technical-det... and https://www.twilio.com/docs/lookup/v2-api/line-status) and will not send a message if a number is 'not' reachable. Unfortunately, as implied by the air quotes, these methods are not infallible. This is done to reduce the costs of sending the message (carriers charge a lot more for commercial customers) but this is definitely stupid for a already-validated number like in this case.
"it turns out messages from 5 digit shortcodes often aren't supported over wifi calling." This does not seems plausible. I live in urban area but do not have good cellural connection at home and my mobile phones are usually route calls via home Wifi. All SMS come through. It is just a low-lever transport and I doubt it cares about message size or numbers.
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It really is absurd that the same companies that won’t allow 2FA with any other method outside of SMS are the same ones not sending to VoIP. Maybe they all go through a service for SMS that blocks it, but it still upsets me. It’s insane to me that maybe every bank I use requires SMS 2FA, but random services I use support apps.
I absolutely cannot stand that no bank I have (US) supports generic TOTP, which is more secure and easier to recover from backup if my phone is broken or stolen. It's inexcusable.