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Comment by lucasyvas | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses 2FA extensively and even has 1Password autofill the OTP codes - 2FA is objectively fucking brutal.

Half of you in here have never met a non-technical user. These folks should not have 2FA on ever, because they can't even use the damn thing with it on.

Yes, those users run a higher risk and should be notified of that extremely clearly. But 2FA is a garbage solution to the problem and it should always be possible to disable it.

I'm going to continue using 2FA happily like most of those in here - but man the lack of empathy is outstanding in here. I feel bad for your users.

And fuck Discord for not allowing me to reset my account with my own damn email address when my phone broke that one time. Total morons, through and through. I'd never want to work with anyone so objectively ignorant and unwilling to admit their ass backwards position.

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Oh please. Every business I’ve ever worked for has enforced MFA for corporate access. You’re acting as if “non technical users” are illiterate subhuman morons. Even my 90 year old grandparents trivially figured it out on their own.

I'm claiming the reverse - the human ones are the normal people who just want to use email without it berating them every time they log in.

Then your grandparents are technical users. Curiously, so are mine. Sorry to tell you that you're wrong though and you have not met the non-technical users.

I've had to try to help my aunt and uncle recover old Apple and Google accounts with complete failure because they've changed cell phone providers and didn't care that their phone numbers changed. At no point are they adequately warned this is the case, and recovery codes are a confusing additional layer that they don't understand.

So they basically lose everything and nobody is willing to help them. You are making a grand assumption about accessibility - not everyone has the capability to grok such a convoluted login process. The non-technical users often aren't morons - they are just differently abled. Maybe they are immigrants who didn't grow up with computers much because they were poor, or have a mental condition.

2FA fails spectacularly on accessibility.

Your reply is an example of the problem - completely oblivious to the users that are horribly underserved by 2FA as it exists.

If your argument relies on classifying the elderly and virtually every corporate employee as technical users perhaps you should rethink your argument.

You're reading what you want to read because your position has no strong foundation. At no point has a specific age or employee class been a cornerstone of the argument. You can simply wait for the day that you are screwed by bad 2FA and then it will be obvious how stupid it is. A mistake can happen to anyone - even the people that know what they're doing.

there are as many meanings of "technical" as there are crafts[0], a corporate job likely include many hours each day working at a computer where you will encounter a lot of the various UX patterns that anyone else would encounter.

You do not need to be a programmer or work in IT to know how to use a computer effectively.

On the other hand there are people that do not use computers nor smartphone features that aren't also offered in feature phones.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/technical#etymonline_v_7660

You are quite right. I have never owned a smart phone myself and never carry any type of phone with me. When I change countries, I try to use shitty pre-paid dumb phones. I was completely unaware that online services seem to hate this, and will lock you out forever if you change your phone number (or change countries - something that has gotten worse, I have noticed, as I have been crossing borders and logging into things for 20 years). It used to be easy. Now it's a nightmare.

I find it disturbing to imagine that people are stuck with phone numbers as de facto ID.

>because they can't even use the damn thing with it on

Trump for example. Which is why his account was regularly hacked.

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