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tl;dr: don't give your password to anybody. we've been saying this since the mid-90s but people still seem to slip up.

gmail's two-factor auth is nice and easy with the handy iPhone app. of course nobody wants to complicate something like sign-in, but email integrity is very important. facebook also has a similar two-factor auth process (though not as nice; they text you, vs a nice app).

two-factor is a no-brainer at this point for managing your identity, especially given the huge volume of leaked passwords we've seen in the past month. it only takes a few minutes to set up and almost completely eliminates problems like the one in this article. if you haven't set it up yet, do it now! much easier than learning the hard way.




FB has been requesting my phone number to complete the authentication backups for a few weeks now, and the ability to opt out is not clearly marked. I have the nagging feeling that this is much more about getting my cellphone into their system.


Or just the fact that they are overwhelmed by users requesting to get their accounts back. A two-factor solution is the only solution to the problem with password reusing that we've been fighting since passwords were first thought of. People are dumb, you can tell them a gazillion time to never use the same password on different sites/programs/whatever, they still do it.

Also, by providing it via text messages compared to an application they reach out to a much broader audience. Not just tech-savvy people like you and me, who probably already had a proper password policy.


Which is a bit silly since Facebook already has one of the most popular mobile apps installed on millions of devices.


but facebook also has many million users who don't have an iPhone nor android phone yet, who can still use two factor auth (i.e. my girlfriend)


Given that he was sorting out his gf's account because he knew her password, that's not at all an accurate tl;dr.




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