Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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Its craziness all the way down. I have a google voice number which is my "default" number with my gmail accounts. All my gmail accounts were automatically migrated to use 2FA with this number which means if I lose all my google devices and I try to log into voice, I'll get 2FA I can't see because of the catch-22 situation of not being able to log into voice.

The only reason I caught this is because they send me a notice about 2FA and I thought, wait what 2FA am I using? Instead of them running a tiny check to see "Wait, is this person using a voice number" they did it anyway. Worse, they know this because if you go into the 2FA page manually it says in bold letters to not use a good voice number.

At this point I'm spooked and I'm just going to port my number into our account at work and have my work phone use this number instead of having a dual number phone with voice. Voice SMS is a mess too. 50% of services can't SMS it a code because Google blocks it. Other services won't accept it for SMS codes because its "not a real phone."

If I didn't catch this then there would have been a day where I'm locked out of my accounts with no apparent way back in.

> Voice SMS is a mess too. 50% of services can't SMS it a code because Google blocks it. Other services won't accept it for SMS codes because its "not a real phone."

The first part of that shouldn't be true. I've used mine to receive all kinds of SMS and it always works fine _except_ for the services that just won't accept the number. Only run across maybe one or two of those, over some years.

For SMS from real people it works fine ofc.

What happens is some organizations run a verifying to see if its a VOIP number, and if it is, considers it invalid for SMS based 2FA, and other authentication, presumably to stop hackers. Some big names use these lists, most notably Zelle to transfer money. Discord as well.

Why Google also seems to block incoming SMS from Microsoft Authentication and others is beyond me. Maybe MS isn't sending because it doesn't consider that number real and just fails silently on their end? Maybe Google's own lists are very aggressive. I suspect the latter because this comes up a lot. No one seems to have a good answer to any of this because there's no laws requiring transparency so they hide their rube-goldberg-esque SMS policies behind obscurity and its up to me, the customer, to somehow navigate this mess.

Yes, from regular people things are fine, but my life isn't dictated by regular people but the mega corporations capitalism creates and how I have to cater to their various technological whims. If my phone can't get messages because these big companies are always feuding in some way, then I'm locked out of essential services I need to live, have a job, do banking, etc. Its a small comfort that my friends can text me when I can't get texts from my bank, money transfers, or for work. As of right now in the USA, having a VOIP number be your primary phone number is unfeasible. I have a work cell with a "real" number that I use for at least 4 different services for SMS because of this issue.

That's really weird. Ya the VOIP thing I've experienced. I don't think I've ever found a company that actually tried to send sms my way and it failed though. Maybe just luck, I don't happen to use any of those companies you mentioned.

Anyway, yeah that's lame. I'm personally abandoning ship from Google Voice myself anyway, but for other reasons.

Just like Microsoft might not want users on cheap VOIP lines because those services tend to be like in the seedy underbelly of the web, Google also doesn't want it to be useful for that purpose, for exactly the same reason.

Discord won't take the numbers, Venmo won't take the numbers.

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