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Comment by authed | Hacker News Reader

Fixed. I used Chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox. Everything back to normal, for now.

So I have also had this happen to me in the past which was one of the reasons I abandoned gmail completely.

Am I understanding this right that you had the correct password but no 2FA authentication and somehow a Firefox user agent on Linux triggered google mail servers to shut you out?

I never really tried with chromium perhaps I can still retrieve old data (Google Support was obviously non existing on this issue).

It's not user agent, it's session (cookies, localStorage) that they didn't have in Firefox, but still had in Chromium. And this isn't Google specific at all.

But they just said they cleared cookies.

Also I travel a fair share (used to) and never faced any issues with any other services except gmail.

It's too stringent to assume the same machine/storage/ip are always used.

Right. Session is stored either in cookies or in Local Storage. Both get cleared when you "clean cookies". If there is no device session, next time you're trying to log in, service will ask to show the second factor (so that hacker can't steal your account through finding the password on some other website).

Firefox didn't work, because person deleted session and didn't have second factor (nor backup auth methods). Chromium worked, because it still had device session.

I'm traveling and using TOR and VPNs just like everybody else and haven't faced any issues. There most definitely is a problem with communicating security/accessibility tradeoffs to the public though, so I'm not putting blame on the op here.

Yes I had the correct password and no 2FA... yet they require some form of second-factor that I am not really aware of.

What do you use instead of gmail ?

The HN crowd generally looks favourably on Fastmail.

For anecdata I am indeed using fastmail! :)

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