3 ms·

One thing I will note is how absolutely essential smart phones have become to our daily existence. A colleague's phone recently broke and her life shutdown beca

One thing I will note is how absolutely essential smart phones have become to our daily existence. A colleague's phone recently broke and her life shutdown because she could not 2fa anywhere, including for reporting her time card, etc. As a result, I cannot take any risks when purchasing a phone. I have to have the most reliable option possible.

capableweb 5y ago
Agree, it's a bit frightening we're so locked to our phones today. But why leave that comment on this particular submission? The PinePhone is not meant to be a phone you use day-to-day, it's meant for curious developers to hack around on. They are being very upfront about this as well. Maybe in the future this will change.
- julienchastang 5y ago
  > But why leave that comment on this particular submission? Sorry if I sounded negative. I agree, efforts like these should be lauded.
Iolaum 5y ago
No matter how reliable your phone is you can always have an accident, like the phone drops and breaks. A good practice, if possible, is to keep an old(er) phone as a backup device and make sure you have proper/backups migration paths. P.S. As a pinephone owner I don't consider it to be a good options for a backup device. I can only hope that one day the ecosystem gets there.
Arch-TK 5y ago
>As a result, I cannot take any risks when purchasing a phone. Or you could make better choices when it comes to how you organise your life so that you do not get in situations where losing your phone completely screws you over. Seriously I don't get why people wilfully get into situations where important things in their life rest on the reliability of their phone. It takes a minimal amount of awareness. And there's no excuse for it. My life is not massively negatively impacted by just refusing to be get chained to a phone.
- julienchastang 5y ago
  The problem is what do you do about 2fa which more and more organizations are requiring almost always via sms ? I suppose yubikeys could be part of the solution of getting away from the phone for auth.
  - Arch-TK 5y ago
    I don't see an issue with SMS 2FA. You can just move the sim card if your phone breaks and also it works without special smartphones. That being said I don't really see SMS 2FA in use that often (I live and work in the UK). I've also not seen a massive push for 2FA which requires a special mobile-only application from organizations. Aside from my bank, where I have the option of a mobile app or a small calculator-looking token (I obviously picked the token), most 2FA I see is basic TOTP (which you can back up and treat as you like) or some third party solution which provides non-mobile options (and half the time someone has reverse engineered the software and there's an open source solution or it's actually just generic TOTP which you can run anywhere). My work relies on a VPN connection and the the token is generated in a special mobile app, they have given me a smarphone for this purpose. I was informed by coworkers that if you reset the token and re-generate the key you can load the key into a slightly modified version of any TOTP program which uses a slightly different interval and it would work. But at the end of the day if my job requires this token and they give me a phone for it and that's the only source of the token and the phone breaks, I'm not going to really fret about it. It's not my problem to solve, all I have to do is contact my employer and get them to sort out getting me a new phone and getting me back up and running. Keeping this backed up is not my responsibility.

capableweb 5y ago

Agree, it's a bit frightening we're so locked to our phones today. But why leave that comment on this particular submission? The PinePhone is not meant to be a phone you use day-to-day, it's meant for curious developers to hack around on. They are being very upfront about this as well. Maybe in the future this will change.

julienchastang 5y ago
> But why leave that comment on this particular submission? Sorry if I sounded negative. I agree, efforts like these should be lauded.

Iolaum 5y ago

No matter how reliable your phone is you can always have an accident, like the phone drops and breaks. A good practice, if possible, is to keep an old(er) phone as a backup device and make sure you have proper/backups migration paths. P.S. As a pinephone owner I don't consider it to be a good options for a backup device. I can only hope that one day the ecosystem gets there.

Arch-TK 5y ago

>As a result, I cannot take any risks when purchasing a phone. Or you could make better choices when it comes to how you organise your life so that you do not get in situations where losing your phone completely screws you over. Seriously I don't get why people wilfully get into situations where important things in their life rest on the reliability of their phone. It takes a minimal amount of awareness. And there's no excuse for it. My life is not massively negatively impacted by just refusing to be get chained to a phone.

julienchastang 5y ago
The problem is what do you do about 2fa which more and more organizations are requiring almost always via sms ? I suppose yubikeys could be part of the solution of getting away from the phone for auth.
- Arch-TK 5y ago
  I don't see an issue with SMS 2FA. You can just move the sim card if your phone breaks and also it works without special smartphones. That being said I don't really see SMS 2FA in use that often (I live and work in the UK). I've also not seen a massive push for 2FA which requires a special mobile-only application from organizations. Aside from my bank, where I have the option of a mobile app or a small calculator-looking token (I obviously picked the token), most 2FA I see is basic TOTP (which you can back up and treat as you like) or some third party solution which provides non-mobile options (and half the time someone has reverse engineered the software and there's an open source solution or it's actually just generic TOTP which you can run anywhere). My work relies on a VPN connection and the the token is generated in a special mobile app, they have given me a smarphone for this purpose. I was informed by coworkers that if you reset the token and re-generate the key you can load the key into a slightly modified version of any TOTP program which uses a slightly different interval and it would work. But at the end of the day if my job requires this token and they give me a phone for it and that's the only source of the token and the phone breaks, I'm not going to really fret about it. It's not my problem to solve, all I have to do is contact my employer and get them to sort out getting me a new phone and getting me back up and running. Keeping this backed up is not my responsibility.