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> I think we all need to consider the possibility of moving off of GitHub, I've come to that conclusion, too. I moaned and groaned when Microsoft bought GitHub

> I think we all need to consider the possibility of moving off of GitHub, I've come to that conclusion, too. I moaned and groaned when Microsoft bought GitHub, but did nothing about it. Now I've begun the migration process. I'd like to spell out some big-picture thoughts on 2FA. Security and convenience are antithetical to each other. Sometimes better solutions come along where you can have a little bit of both. But ultimately, they're trade-offs. Do you value security, or do you value convenience? And in what proportion? Furthermore, increasing security also increases fragility. There's more to go wrong. Posters here have been talking about losing their devices, and so forth. These are legitimate concerns. These points have rebuttals, such as recovery procedures, and so forth. OK, and you're sure grandma is up to the task, is she? All these convenience tools: they're easy to use until they aren't. So not only do you have to think about security vs convenience, you have to consider downside risks on both ends of the spectrum. It's not as easy as saying "moar security" and reading press reports about the advisability of such systems.

jjav 4y ago
> Do you value security, or do you value convenience? And in what proportion? Or to look at this from the threat analysis side, there are many different threat models and not everyone has the same ones. This is why it is so wrong for these cloud services to consider only one single threat model and impose it on everyone. Denial of service is also a consideration in threat modeling and 2FA does increase the risk of loss of access. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on other factors which will vary for each individual and group. It's never a clear cut answer. Personally I have TOTP enabled on my github account (not on a phone, that's too fragile) but that's because it makes sense for my use case. There are other provider accounts where I have no desire to ever enable 2FA because I value access from anywhere with only my memory far more. Cloud providers should not be making threat modeling decisions on behalf of users, each user needs to make their own. Another reason to self host most things, you can implement your own best policy.

jjav 4y ago

> Do you value security, or do you value convenience? And in what proportion? Or to look at this from the threat analysis side, there are many different threat models and not everyone has the same ones. This is why it is so wrong for these cloud services to consider only one single threat model and impose it on everyone. Denial of service is also a consideration in threat modeling and 2FA does increase the risk of loss of access. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on other factors which will vary for each individual and group. It's never a clear cut answer. Personally I have TOTP enabled on my github account (not on a phone, that's too fragile) but that's because it makes sense for my use case. There are other provider accounts where I have no desire to ever enable 2FA because I value access from anywhere with only my memory far more. Cloud providers should not be making threat modeling decisions on behalf of users, each user needs to make their own. Another reason to self host most things, you can implement your own best policy.