4 ms·
SMS 2FA costs money per message. It's also subject to telecom rules -- you usually need to buy short codes by geography if you're sending at scale, and that inv
by kabdib 6y ago
SMS 2FA costs money per message. It's also subject to telecom rules -- you usually need to buy short codes by geography if you're sending at scale, and that involves dealing with bureaucracies at scale, too. Getting a short code can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars. Of course you can always pay to have other people do that management for you. But you're going to pay, nonetheless.
Then you have to worry about fraud, and whether telcos in <random country> have been hacked, or are corrupt, and are leaking messages to bad guys.
I've seen entire (small) countries drop out, too. Usually the way you find out about this is that support notices an uptick in users in <smallish country> complaining about not getting messages, or you notice that the entirety of some geography isn't successfully completing the transactions you tried to protect with SMS. Er, you did consult the (changing) prefix database and phone number parser to (semi) reliably determine a geography from a phone number, right? Isn't parsing phone numbers fun?
It's fractally terrible and expensive, and I haven't even talked about APIs yet.
- southerntofu 6y ago> SMS 2FA costs money per message. This is only because the telephone cartels control the networks. The same is more or less true of Internet. Operators have advocated for anti-open-wifi laws across the globe so they can sell their internet access plans (xDSL/3G), when we could have free networking for all in all places. Seriously though, why couldn't we have FREE privacy-friendly networking as a public service?
- toopok4k3 6y agoWhy? Here you have to buy access to certain frequency ranges(big money required). The bidding happens from time to time. Building the network infrastructure is not cheap either and requires specialists to work for you. I'd rather buy that 4G from a company that can deliver it everywhere I go than move backwards in progress to use some random WIFI hosted by Joe that fights over the same frequency as John's across the road. The "cartel" networks work pretty good tbh. They just have stagnated in everything else but networking.