Probably a genuinely useful application of biometric authentication.
Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
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Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
People can't remember many good passwords. So they start reusing them. If one site has a leak, everything is lost without 2FA.
So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to their email? Homeless people aren't stupid and strong password don't have to be incredibly hard to remember. I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. There is literally nothing more important than your email. Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means of recovery, whereas if you lose access to…
Who's to say that your email account getting hacked is less dire than losing access to it? Attackers can easily search your inbox for 'verify your email', visit any website of value, and use their access to change the account away from your email to an address that they own, effectively removing your access to your third-party website accounts entirely.
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I remember when I used Authy briefly (Google Authenticator finally added the ability to mass import/export codes shortly after I ended up trying Authy), you create a login and set a master password, and then you have access to your codes on any device when you log into the app. Of course, this means that you have to trust Authy with your codes being stored externally, but this might be one of the sets of ci…
Authy recovery requires you to have access to the same phone number when you want to restore to a new device.
Oh, interesting, I didn't even realize that when I used it! I guess that goes to show how easy it is to take something like that for granted
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Maybe the solution should be to have some basic free state-paid email provider for those people. They are not forced to use Gmail specifically (albeit the number of non-sucking and free email providers is probably close to zero). You don't need to use Gmail. There are a lot of good free mail providers.
And what happens if I've already been using that gmail address and then become homeless? I guess too bad! Should have thought of my future homelessness when I was signing up for an email service a decade ago!
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Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to their email? Homeless people aren't stupid and strong password don't have to be incredibly hard to remember. I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. There is literally nothing more important than your email. Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means of recovery, whereas if you lose access to…
I would rank a home as more important than email; I'd certainly rather lose access to my email than my home. But by definition, the homeless have already lost a home (assuming they weren't born homeless) - and I've forgotten passwords before. So "the stupid homeless just need to memorize their password" isn't a solution.
It's not a solution, but it's a heck of a lot better than locking them out of their accounts even if they still know their password!
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#246This problem, and the not-my-problem responses, really highlight the self centered mindset we have encouraged. What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues? We need to collectively take more responsibility for those in the worst situations. If you've every tried to teach an old person how to use 2FA you know it's an uphill battle. Using a fingerprint…
This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course we'd be more emotionally involved if it was someone we knew, that's not hypocritical. Most people aren't against fixing societal problems, either. As it stands, homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers. The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to terrible decisions.…
To be fair, some of us have been calling attention to this problem for a long ass time, and nothing is being done about it.
E-mail needs to be a regulated utility, given that getting locked out of one’s email happens all the time with catastrophic consequences.
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phone number decision is stupid. I up and jump countries every few years. Each time, I'm switching to a new number. I'm the opposite of homeless, I'm that jet set elite. The idea that you want, need, should or will tie your identity to a phone number where people can always reach you is long outdated.
Sticking my German sim card into my phone for fifteen minutes in all sorts of random countries and continents and waiting for a number to come through always feels absurd. I pray for the rise of esims! I feel like it's on the cards.
I thought I got everything moved over to an authenticator app before leaving home but I forgot one, I got a "check your phone for verification SMS" earlier today. My American SIM could get the text but my foreign sim was giving my laptop internet access. Big pain in the ass.
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Actually giving homes to the homeless would probably be cheaper than whatever we are doing now, even taking into account the mental illness and drug-abuse problems that factor into this. This point is worth reiterating. Homelessness can be solved by providing housing. Yes, homelessness is a complex multi-faceted problem, but the first order solution to the problem is to provide housing. Homelessness is a problem wi…
Unfortunately it's more complicated than this. There have been nonprofit organizations and government initiatives to give homeless people space in unoccupied hotels for example. What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the living space in a variety of ways. It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue of mental health. In the USA, there are pretty much zero mental health resources for people in…
> What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the living space in a variety of ways.
Citation very much needed here. This certainly does happen. But, I don’t believe this the general (i.e. typical) outcome. From what I understand talking to acquaintances who work in this area, wrecking the place is not the typical outcome. And property damage is generally cheaper to address than the constant provision of emergency services.
I agree that mental health (and substance use) are major factors in homelessness, but those issues are more or less impossible to address when people are living on the street with no permanent address and no place to keep e.g. a cell phone without it being stolen.
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wtf Calling homelessness a "niche" .. peak apres moi le deluge
Exactly. The word people should be looking for is "vulnerable". They are not a niche category, they are a vulnerable category, and need protection, not dismissal.
You're absolutely right.
Now let's talk about how much effort and what level of resources it's reasonable to expect a commercial entity to invest in extending protections to vulnerable people in need who happen to not be customers.
Perhaps we're asking the wrong entity to address this problem? This seems more like a public service infrastructure problem.
Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They hadn’t started collecting social security due to some debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished. Is this common? I knew a guy who had the same mindset. I ended up paying him in cash for some work, he was convinced that if he made any money in a traditional role it would be instantly garnished.
It is unfortunately common. We're not perfectly rational robots, and so for a decent subset of the population, they go off what has happened to them. And being paid $1k and assuming they'd have $1k and then discovering they only had $500 because of garnishment tells them "don't accept checks, cash is the only safe method". And then it's not a step much further to be "it's not worth setting up social security because…
You do realize jail isn't some magical unifying force of social justice right?
A while back a guy destroyed a vehicle of mine and drove off. Per criminal law in my jurisdiction, he should have served at least 45 days for that offense. But it isn't like that would ever give me my property back. It's also unlikely to deter that particular crime in the population.