Twitter to charge users for SMS two-factor authentication

Bigger picture here is to disincentivise bad practice of SMS 2FA.

A good move - regardless if you care about what Elon is about or not.

Media turned on him pretty quickly and it causes a lot of noise in the background distracting from the achievements.

Follow the science :)

Nobody should be using text 2fa anyway. It’s being actively subverted by bad actors.

Same for Twitter;-)

my favorite way around this is command line:

oathtool --totp -b 'someCode'

same as any authenticator app but you don't have to take out your phone.

On a mac it's brew install oath-toolkit to get this oathtool executable.

Then I alias in .zshrc like:

alias auth_twitter="oathtool --totp -b 'someCode'"

and backup my whole .zshrc file with all the codes.

turns out this was just a brokey move by Elon to reduce the telco cost, yet his preservation of SMS for blue ticks made it a predictable PR disaster