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SMS 2FA is not just insecure, it's also hostile to mountain people

i have a friend -- she's an old lady born and raised here in the western north carolina mountains. she hates computers, yes, but she's be...

she hates computers, yes, but she's been willing to learn a lot and quickly after joining a big signal group chat that our shared local community uses to keep in touch. make a list, over time, of the websites that she's locked out of because of SMS 2FA not be able to use those sites at home the whole time she's making the list schedule a meetup with a friend like me drive to town to meet the friend sit down and systematically go through the list of websites and convert them to TOTP inevitably discover that some of them don't support TOTP try and contact those companies and explain that they need to turn off SMS 2FA on her account so that she can use their healthcare/banking/email/whatever service from her home discover that it's not possible to talk to a company anymore in 2025 port her cellphone number to a VOIP provider that does support receiving SMS from shortcodes over wifi spend hundreds of dollars setting up a cell tower signal booster outside her house move

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