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> ... the homeless will lose any physical thing after N weeks. So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? I don't see a solution. How about the homeless pers

> ... the homeless will lose any physical thing after N weeks. So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? I don't see a solution. How about the homeless person remembers a good password, and that's all that's needed for authentication? You know, just like it used to be. What exactly is wrong with that?

Double_a_92 4y ago
People can't remember many good passwords. So they start reusing them. If one site has a leak, everything is lost without 2FA.
- sph 4y ago
  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 your email you're pretty much fucked.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      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!
  - judge2020 4y ago
    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.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      I don't know that it is less dire, but I do think it's less likely. Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked three times per year? Also... maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access is worse, but the user should have the right to make that decision! Google can set the default, but the user knows his or her own life.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        > Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked three times per year? The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam. > maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access is worse, but the user should have the right to make that decision Getting hacked makes losing access considerably more likely. This ain't one or the other.
        Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        > The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam. If you want to spam people, why not just sign up for your own gmail account?
        yellowapple 4y ago
        Because then it'd be tied to my number (assuming I haven't figured out some workaround) and could then be traced back to me.
    - sph 4y ago
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. When your account is stolen the attacker changes your password. You lose access to your email forever and lose access to all of the services that use your email as a recovery platform.
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      The point here is that that happens to these people already. I'm sure they'd much rather have only a chance of it happening than it being a guarantee.
  - everforward 4y ago
    > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. This is functionally the outcome of getting hacked, if you want any kind of decent security measures. Any way that Google can give you access back on a password-only account is going to be rife with bad actors using social engineering to gain control of accounts. As long as that form/page exists, it is a threat vector. What you're asking is for the password to be the only proof that someone owns an account, which means a hacker can demonstrate ownership just as much as you can. Banks have more options for account recovery because we're willing to give them a lot more info. They can force me to come in to a branch and compare my ID to my face, or ask for my SSN, or any number of things we're not comfortable handing over to Google (especially over the web).
  - syrrim 4y ago
    > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. step 1: get your account hacked step 2: hacker changes password step 3: lose access to your email, forever What you've presented is not in fact a dichotomy, for any practical purposes.
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      Except that they're already losing access to email, forever. A small chance of it happening because of a hacker is better than a statistical guarantee of it happening from phone theft.
      - syrrim 4y ago
        Th GGP was speaking in the first person. I personally have had hackers try to break into my account before, but have never lost my phone number. Furthermore, notwithstanding the policies of the "obamaphone" program, I would be able to recover my phone number if I lost my phone. So, speaking for the vast majority of people, it would be preferable to have losing my phone number lock me out of my account than having my password leaked lock me out of my account. If that is the dichotomy, and if we still care about the welfare of the average person, the correct choice is incredibly clear.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to their email? If an attacker breaks in and changes your password, you already do very likely permanently lose access to your email. Account recovery from that point is a hairy process even for people who have a place to safely store important documents, let alone those who don't. > Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means of recovery Those rely on forms of identification that the unhoused disproportionately lack (for the same reasons that they are more prone to lose access to phone numbers). This is also among the reasons why being unhoused tends to correlate with being unbanked.
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  Is it though? Just because a password leaked doesn’t mean it will actually be abused. A homeless person without a credit card in their Google account is naturally limited in the amount of damage that can be done. Security questions are probably enough, at least for people who can’t handle 2FA.
rbone80 4y ago
A good password is one that is difficult to crack which potentially means it will be difficult to remember. Long phrase passwords are recommended to be the most secure, but ironically the more convoluted the password, the harder it is to remember. In the case that a service requires a new password every x months, remembering a secure password is out the window. This type of practice encourages unsafe and easily guessable passwords such as “password1”, “password2”, etc…
bennyp101 4y ago
How do you remember a complex password? By practice? On what device? I’m sure those involved have bigger things to worry about/remember than a complex password to email. I don’t think that is the solution. I also don’t know what is. Public services that somehow provide safe access to email etc?
- franga2000 4y ago
  Complex doesn't mean hard to remember. XKCD936-style passwords (four words with no special chars) are nearly uncrackable and quite easy to remember. Something even simpler like [mother's name][father's name][year of birth] is also very strong when you aren't being targeted specifically (you almost certainly aren't, especially if you're homeless). The remaining issue is password reuse, but that's mostly solved by having two passwords - one for your email and one for everything else.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  The same way I remember everything else: I think about it enough. There are plenty of good memorable password mnemonics out there, too. So that seems a non-issue. In any case, I'm sure those involved would prefer the option of remembering a password to not having that option and getting locked out forever. Seems like a good solution. There may be better ones you can implement once this one is, always room for improvement you know
- laptop-man 4y ago
  I always recommend a easy to remember sentence as a password. with spaces, punctuation, some sort of capilatiozation scheme (cap every last letter, or every other ,etc) and throw a number in there. lot easier to remember than 32 random bits. purposely misspelling something, adding spaces, and your own cap scheme make it a secure password.
  - pflenker 4y ago
    What works great for me is using _songs_ , ideally a sentence not directly from the chorus of a lesser-known song, complete with punctutation and some obvious replacement rules (such as `and` -> `&` ) . The reason why this works so great is that many people have some obscure song "in them" that they know by heart but which are not super widely known. I only had to change one of my passwords once when my coworkers discovered I was reliably whistling "Stayin' alive" after logging in.
SkyBelow 4y ago
The average person cannot remember a good password without some help, be it using it everywhere, writing it down, or using a password manager. Homeless individuals, on average, have many more stressors in life, much higher rates of traumatic brain injury, and a number of other factors that make their ability to remember good passwords much worse than the average person. Given this solution doesn't work for the average person, it will have even less success applied to the homeless.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  How many passwords does an homeless person need to remember ? I’m with you that an average person is probably using at least dozens of services that need credentials, but these people are probably not login on Amazon or checking their 401k online for instance, nd can probably get by with a a very limited set of stuff to remember.
  - abeyer 4y ago
    If they're relying on government social services, they may well have a whole plethora of accounts to manage that.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      I don't know how dire it is in general, but there's at least a fighting chance to have some kind of unified login at that level. NThinking about it, now that many "casual" sites also accept google login the number of accounts needed might really be minimal.
      - abeyer 4y ago
        Unfortunately (at least in the US) these types of services tend to be a patchwork of different agencies at different levels of government... you'll potentially see local, regional, state, and federal all for one person. If you're lucky agencies at the same level might share a unified login of some sort, but good luck finding that across different levels.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> How about the homeless person remembers a good password, and that's all that's needed for authentication? Gosh, I don't know, how about literally all of the problems that 2FA solves in the first place? Passwords alone are a bad solution (often forgotten, easily re-used insecurely) for people without all of the challenges and frequent mental issues that accompany homelessness, why would you think they'd be a good solution for people who, as the OP says, aren't capable of keeping track of a physical device for more than N weeks? I'm not unsympathetic to the problems of the homeless ant the burdens 2FA entails, but I'm also not willing to ignore the huge problems the 2FA solves, and realizing there will often be a tradeoff between making it very difficult to hack into accounts and making it easy for people with mental and other problems access their accounts.
- upofadown 4y ago
  >...often forgotten... The great thing about something like an email service is that password guessing can be extremely rate limited. You miss three guesses and you can't log in for several hours. So an easily remembered password is perfectly fine unless it is blindingly obvious. As a homeless person loosing access to a phone on a regular basis, I am going to be comfortable with the risk that the Gmail password hashes might get leaked. I think others would be quite comfortable with that risk as well...
- LightHugger 4y ago
  2fa is a good option, but there are many situations where a plain password is just superior. if you ignore this reality, that passwords are legitimately more secure and better for a lot of people, then you're undermining an existing working security system and will just cause chaos and loss for people.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    And to generalize, I'd say that... "There is an imperfect existing solution, with a problem, therefore we will ban the existing solution and move to a new, better one" ... should require extraordinary certainty in completeness of ones new solution before banning the previous. There are very few times when the legacy method should be deprecated, and Google is the poster child of someone who shouldn't be trusted to recognize them. (Looks pointedly at Chrome mv2/3 hubris and implementation clusterfuck)
renewiltord 4y ago
Quite simply there are multiple factors at play here. Do you force 2FA on almost everyone and reduce hostile account takeovers to negligible? Do you allow for no 2FA and permit the homeless use case? I think Google faced a trolley problem and made the right decision. You need a different tool "homeless mail" for them. It's Gmail. You don't have to use it. There's a lot of mail providers out there. Whatever, if this guy won't set it up I will. I'll stick a 20 msg / hr, 100 / day limit on it and call it a nice anti-spam day.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Many people exist and use email before becoming homeless. When that email is gmail - they actually do have to use it when they become homeless!
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I think if you trolley-problem this you'll still end up with Google's choice being the right one.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      I did and I don’t. Absolutely depends on the value and risk weighting you give to homeless people needing their email, of course.
      - samdcbu 4y ago
        Based on Google documentation you can still turn off 2fa, so we are weighing the account security of the hundreds of millions of users who would never turn on 2fa but really should, versus the people who lose their 2FA verification method and are locked out of their account. Maybe the harm of not being able to login is worse than having your identity stolen but whose to say.
- Longlius 4y ago
  You don't solve a trolley problem. The entire point is that it's unresolvable from most ethical paradigms other than naïve utilitarianism (which is why it exists - to mock that way of thinking).
yellowapple 4y ago
> How about the homeless person remembers a good password, Which would go one of two ways: 1. One uses the same password one uses everywhere else, and now one is much more vulnerable to credential stuffing 2. One is reliant on a book of passwords or a password management app on one's phone, resulting in the same exact problem we're trying to solve
- LightHugger 4y ago
  being homeless doesn't mean you don't have the ability to remember a good password. good means not duplicated.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Even people not dealing with the stress and trauma of being unhoused have trouble remembering passwords - even when they're shared across accounts, let alone when they're unique. This ain't a "homeless people are dumb" argument; it's a "humans gonna human" argument.
- radford-neal 4y ago
  No. One can just remember a good password for gmail, and either use other passwords elsewhere (maybe bad, re-used, ones, or maybe good ones, not relevant if we're talking about gmail), or just always authenticate elsewhere using your gmail account. Remembering one good password is not too onerous. Easier, it seems, that keeping any physical object in your possession if you're homeless. (I would assume that most losses are not due to cognitive failure, but instead are things like thefts when one is asleep.)
googlryas 4y ago
That's literally how it was before 2FA. You can just look up the reasons for 2FA to answer your question.
- account42 4y ago
  So you are saying that the homeless using plain passwords is wrong because tech giants want to collect personally identifying information under the guise of security? How does that make sense?
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Over on /r/sysadmin there was a discussion this morning about email systems for dementia patients. How do you provide for someone that is forgetting that they are forgetting? Pretty much EVERYONE will have cognitive decline in their twilight years. It would be nice if we could have communication systems that are compatible with basic human biology.
- kweingar 4y ago
  > It would be nice if we could have communication systems that are compatible with basic human biology. At some point, this becomes a problem better suited to the government. Imagine you have a loved one who has dementia or is homeless and incapable of administering their digital accounts with traditional authentication methods. You want to take over their accounts. You will need to present evidence that: - they are indeed incapacitated - they are who they say they are, aside from you vouching for them - you are who you say you are - you legitimately represent this person - there isn’t somebody else who has a better claim at representing that person I personally don’t want any tech company in the position to sort through all of that on a case-by-case basis and decide which accounts to unlock or transfer ownership to. Let the government or the courts figure that out.
IncRnd 4y ago
If a person can remember a password that is a minimum of 8-digits, they can remember an 8-digit backup code that is already provided by google. They are functionally equivalent, but a backup code is one-time use.
- tmnvix 4y ago
  Using a password multiple times helps you remember it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dskrvk 4y ago
Lower in the same thread: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1577906942080598017?s=61&t=aOYaDewGIrx4o7k-BxgIIQ https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1577906942080598017?s=6... > PS: Many unhoused people access their email rarely, intermittently; they don't stay logged in. They often have to guess several times to remember their password. 2FA doesn’t work, and remembering passwords doesn’t work either. Checkmate.
- xg15 4y ago
  Having to guess several times != having forgotten your password. I think what this actually calls for though is a way to prove your identity by talking to an actual human. Something that used to be the standard before tech companies declared that it was too inefficient.
  - paledot 4y ago
    Sadly, SIM cloning attacks start by social engineering a cell phone support person into sending the attacker a replacement for the SIM they "lost".
    - simfree 4y ago
      Your thinking of SIM swapping attacks. SIM cloning is much harder without breaching the SIM manufacturer (often Gemalto or another giant vendor). Rerouting traffic with a malicious home location record (like what was done to Merkel for years), or changing the eSPID/NNID for a numbers texting enablement is much easier than doing a SIM swap and you can usually avoid detection too.
      - samdcbu 4y ago
        The irony of SIM cards being a cryptographically strong smart card and then carriers let their employees give out replacement SIMs left and right. Ah, humans. fun fact: SIM cards can run applets based on Java. That’s how mobile payments are able to work in developing nations. I think there was a DEFCON talk about it a few years ago.
KirillPanov 4y ago
Apparently there is great concern about nation-state-level attacks against the unhoused.

Double_a_92 4y ago

People can't remember many good passwords. So they start reusing them. If one site has a leak, everything is lost without 2FA.

sph 4y ago
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 your email you're pretty much fucked.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    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!
- judge2020 4y ago
  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.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I don't know that it is less dire, but I do think it's less likely. Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked three times per year? Also... maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access is worse, but the user should have the right to make that decision! Google can set the default, but the user knows his or her own life.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      > Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked three times per year? The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam. > maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access is worse, but the user should have the right to make that decision Getting hacked makes losing access considerably more likely. This ain't one or the other.
      - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        > The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam. If you want to spam people, why not just sign up for your own gmail account?
        yellowapple 4y ago
        Because then it'd be tied to my number (assuming I haven't figured out some workaround) and could then be traced back to me.
  - sph 4y ago
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. When your account is stolen the attacker changes your password. You lose access to your email forever and lose access to all of the services that use your email as a recovery platform.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    The point here is that that happens to these people already. I'm sure they'd much rather have only a chance of it happening than it being a guarantee.
- everforward 4y ago
  > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. This is functionally the outcome of getting hacked, if you want any kind of decent security measures. Any way that Google can give you access back on a password-only account is going to be rife with bad actors using social engineering to gain control of accounts. As long as that form/page exists, it is a threat vector. What you're asking is for the password to be the only proof that someone owns an account, which means a hacker can demonstrate ownership just as much as you can. Banks have more options for account recovery because we're willing to give them a lot more info. They can force me to come in to a branch and compare my ID to my face, or ask for my SSN, or any number of things we're not comfortable handing over to Google (especially over the web).
- syrrim 4y ago
  > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever. step 1: get your account hacked step 2: hacker changes password step 3: lose access to your email, forever What you've presented is not in fact a dichotomy, for any practical purposes.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Except that they're already losing access to email, forever. A small chance of it happening because of a hacker is better than a statistical guarantee of it happening from phone theft.
    - syrrim 4y ago
      Th GGP was speaking in the first person. I personally have had hackers try to break into my account before, but have never lost my phone number. Furthermore, notwithstanding the policies of the "obamaphone" program, I would be able to recover my phone number if I lost my phone. So, speaking for the vast majority of people, it would be preferable to have losing my phone number lock me out of my account than having my password leaked lock me out of my account. If that is the dichotomy, and if we still care about the welfare of the average person, the correct choice is incredibly clear.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to their email? If an attacker breaks in and changes your password, you already do very likely permanently lose access to your email. Account recovery from that point is a hairy process even for people who have a place to safely store important documents, let alone those who don't. > Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means of recovery Those rely on forms of identification that the unhoused disproportionately lack (for the same reasons that they are more prone to lose access to phone numbers). This is also among the reasons why being unhoused tends to correlate with being unbanked.
n8cpdx 4y ago
Is it though? Just because a password leaked doesn’t mean it will actually be abused. A homeless person without a credit card in their Google account is naturally limited in the amount of damage that can be done. Security questions are probably enough, at least for people who can’t handle 2FA.

rbone80 4y ago

A good password is one that is difficult to crack which potentially means it will be difficult to remember. Long phrase passwords are recommended to be the most secure, but ironically the more convoluted the password, the harder it is to remember. In the case that a service requires a new password every x months, remembering a secure password is out the window. This type of practice encourages unsafe and easily guessable passwords such as “password1”, “password2”, etc…

bennyp101 4y ago

How do you remember a complex password? By practice? On what device? I’m sure those involved have bigger things to worry about/remember than a complex password to email. I don’t think that is the solution. I also don’t know what is. Public services that somehow provide safe access to email etc?

franga2000 4y ago
Complex doesn't mean hard to remember. XKCD936-style passwords (four words with no special chars) are nearly uncrackable and quite easy to remember. Something even simpler like [mother's name][father's name][year of birth] is also very strong when you aren't being targeted specifically (you almost certainly aren't, especially if you're homeless). The remaining issue is password reuse, but that's mostly solved by having two passwords - one for your email and one for everything else.
ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
The same way I remember everything else: I think about it enough. There are plenty of good memorable password mnemonics out there, too. So that seems a non-issue. In any case, I'm sure those involved would prefer the option of remembering a password to not having that option and getting locked out forever. Seems like a good solution. There may be better ones you can implement once this one is, always room for improvement you know
laptop-man 4y ago
I always recommend a easy to remember sentence as a password. with spaces, punctuation, some sort of capilatiozation scheme (cap every last letter, or every other ,etc) and throw a number in there. lot easier to remember than 32 random bits. purposely misspelling something, adding spaces, and your own cap scheme make it a secure password.
- pflenker 4y ago
  What works great for me is using _songs_ , ideally a sentence not directly from the chorus of a lesser-known song, complete with punctutation and some obvious replacement rules (such as `and` -> `&` ) . The reason why this works so great is that many people have some obscure song "in them" that they know by heart but which are not super widely known. I only had to change one of my passwords once when my coworkers discovered I was reliably whistling "Stayin' alive" after logging in.

SkyBelow 4y ago

The average person cannot remember a good password without some help, be it using it everywhere, writing it down, or using a password manager. Homeless individuals, on average, have many more stressors in life, much higher rates of traumatic brain injury, and a number of other factors that make their ability to remember good passwords much worse than the average person. Given this solution doesn't work for the average person, it will have even less success applied to the homeless.

makeitdouble 4y ago
How many passwords does an homeless person need to remember ? I’m with you that an average person is probably using at least dozens of services that need credentials, but these people are probably not login on Amazon or checking their 401k online for instance, nd can probably get by with a a very limited set of stuff to remember.
- abeyer 4y ago
  If they're relying on government social services, they may well have a whole plethora of accounts to manage that.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I don't know how dire it is in general, but there's at least a fighting chance to have some kind of unified login at that level. NThinking about it, now that many "casual" sites also accept google login the number of accounts needed might really be minimal.
    - abeyer 4y ago
      Unfortunately (at least in the US) these types of services tend to be a patchwork of different agencies at different levels of government... you'll potentially see local, regional, state, and federal all for one person. If you're lucky agencies at the same level might share a unified login of some sort, but good luck finding that across different levels.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> How about the homeless person remembers a good password, and that's all that's needed for authentication? Gosh, I don't know, how about literally all of the problems that 2FA solves in the first place? Passwords alone are a bad solution (often forgotten, easily re-used insecurely) for people without all of the challenges and frequent mental issues that accompany homelessness, why would you think they'd be a good solution for people who, as the OP says, aren't capable of keeping track of a physical device for more than N weeks? I'm not unsympathetic to the problems of the homeless ant the burdens 2FA entails, but I'm also not willing to ignore the huge problems the 2FA solves, and realizing there will often be a tradeoff between making it very difficult to hack into accounts and making it easy for people with mental and other problems access their accounts.

upofadown 4y ago
>...often forgotten... The great thing about something like an email service is that password guessing can be extremely rate limited. You miss three guesses and you can't log in for several hours. So an easily remembered password is perfectly fine unless it is blindingly obvious. As a homeless person loosing access to a phone on a regular basis, I am going to be comfortable with the risk that the Gmail password hashes might get leaked. I think others would be quite comfortable with that risk as well...
LightHugger 4y ago
2fa is a good option, but there are many situations where a plain password is just superior. if you ignore this reality, that passwords are legitimately more secure and better for a lot of people, then you're undermining an existing working security system and will just cause chaos and loss for people.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  And to generalize, I'd say that... "There is an imperfect existing solution, with a problem, therefore we will ban the existing solution and move to a new, better one" ... should require extraordinary certainty in completeness of ones new solution before banning the previous. There are very few times when the legacy method should be deprecated, and Google is the poster child of someone who shouldn't be trusted to recognize them. (Looks pointedly at Chrome mv2/3 hubris and implementation clusterfuck)

renewiltord 4y ago

Quite simply there are multiple factors at play here. Do you force 2FA on almost everyone and reduce hostile account takeovers to negligible? Do you allow for no 2FA and permit the homeless use case? I think Google faced a trolley problem and made the right decision. You need a different tool "homeless mail" for them. It's Gmail. You don't have to use it. There's a lot of mail providers out there. Whatever, if this guy won't set it up I will. I'll stick a 20 msg / hr, 100 / day limit on it and call it a nice anti-spam day.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
Many people exist and use email before becoming homeless. When that email is gmail - they actually do have to use it when they become homeless!
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I think if you trolley-problem this you'll still end up with Google's choice being the right one.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    I did and I don’t. Absolutely depends on the value and risk weighting you give to homeless people needing their email, of course.
    - samdcbu 4y ago
      Based on Google documentation you can still turn off 2fa, so we are weighing the account security of the hundreds of millions of users who would never turn on 2fa but really should, versus the people who lose their 2FA verification method and are locked out of their account. Maybe the harm of not being able to login is worse than having your identity stolen but whose to say.
Longlius 4y ago
You don't solve a trolley problem. The entire point is that it's unresolvable from most ethical paradigms other than naïve utilitarianism (which is why it exists - to mock that way of thinking).

yellowapple 4y ago

> How about the homeless person remembers a good password, Which would go one of two ways: 1. One uses the same password one uses everywhere else, and now one is much more vulnerable to credential stuffing 2. One is reliant on a book of passwords or a password management app on one's phone, resulting in the same exact problem we're trying to solve

LightHugger 4y ago
being homeless doesn't mean you don't have the ability to remember a good password. good means not duplicated.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Even people not dealing with the stress and trauma of being unhoused have trouble remembering passwords - even when they're shared across accounts, let alone when they're unique. This ain't a "homeless people are dumb" argument; it's a "humans gonna human" argument.
radford-neal 4y ago
No. One can just remember a good password for gmail, and either use other passwords elsewhere (maybe bad, re-used, ones, or maybe good ones, not relevant if we're talking about gmail), or just always authenticate elsewhere using your gmail account. Remembering one good password is not too onerous. Easier, it seems, that keeping any physical object in your possession if you're homeless. (I would assume that most losses are not due to cognitive failure, but instead are things like thefts when one is asleep.)

googlryas 4y ago

That's literally how it was before 2FA. You can just look up the reasons for 2FA to answer your question.

account42 4y ago
So you are saying that the homeless using plain passwords is wrong because tech giants want to collect personally identifying information under the guise of security? How does that make sense?

jabroni_salad 4y ago

Over on /r/sysadmin there was a discussion this morning about email systems for dementia patients. How do you provide for someone that is forgetting that they are forgetting? Pretty much EVERYONE will have cognitive decline in their twilight years. It would be nice if we could have communication systems that are compatible with basic human biology.

kweingar 4y ago
> It would be nice if we could have communication systems that are compatible with basic human biology. At some point, this becomes a problem better suited to the government. Imagine you have a loved one who has dementia or is homeless and incapable of administering their digital accounts with traditional authentication methods. You want to take over their accounts. You will need to present evidence that: - they are indeed incapacitated - they are who they say they are, aside from you vouching for them - you are who you say you are - you legitimately represent this person - there isn’t somebody else who has a better claim at representing that person I personally don’t want any tech company in the position to sort through all of that on a case-by-case basis and decide which accounts to unlock or transfer ownership to. Let the government or the courts figure that out.

IncRnd 4y ago

If a person can remember a password that is a minimum of 8-digits, they can remember an 8-digit backup code that is already provided by google. They are functionally equivalent, but a backup code is one-time use.

tmnvix 4y ago
Using a password multiple times helps you remember it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dskrvk 4y ago

Lower in the same thread: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1577906942080598017?s=61&t=aOYaDewGIrx4o7k-BxgIIQ https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1577906942080598017?s=6... > PS: Many unhoused people access their email rarely, intermittently; they don't stay logged in. They often have to guess several times to remember their password. 2FA doesn’t work, and remembering passwords doesn’t work either. Checkmate.

xg15 4y ago
Having to guess several times != having forgotten your password. I think what this actually calls for though is a way to prove your identity by talking to an actual human. Something that used to be the standard before tech companies declared that it was too inefficient.
- paledot 4y ago
  Sadly, SIM cloning attacks start by social engineering a cell phone support person into sending the attacker a replacement for the SIM they "lost".
  - simfree 4y ago
    Your thinking of SIM swapping attacks. SIM cloning is much harder without breaching the SIM manufacturer (often Gemalto or another giant vendor). Rerouting traffic with a malicious home location record (like what was done to Merkel for years), or changing the eSPID/NNID for a numbers texting enablement is much easier than doing a SIM swap and you can usually avoid detection too.
    - samdcbu 4y ago
      The irony of SIM cards being a cryptographically strong smart card and then carriers let their employees give out replacement SIMs left and right. Ah, humans. fun fact: SIM cards can run applets based on Java. That’s how mobile payments are able to work in developing nations. I think there was a DEFCON talk about it a few years ago.

KirillPanov 4y ago

Apparently there is great concern about nation-state-level attacks against the unhoused.