Firefox Relay – secure random email and phone number masks | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Relay – secure random email and phone number masks

relay.firefox.com

48 pointssuperkuh17 comments

I hate giving out my phone number. I hope this will work well and with less trouble than getting a second phone.

Are there any cheapsish services out there that already do this that work in the eu? Last time I checked I couldn’t find any

That caught my attention too. Right now, the cheapest option out there still seems to be getting a dumbphone and a few pre-paid SIM cards. Sadly, pre-paid cards are no longer an option in many EU countries. Even just the least expensive SMS gateways are like 10 €/month last time I checked.

The good news is that if you find a prepaid SIM in one EU country, you should be able to continue using it in every EU country as long as you top it up. I often wish I still had my Croatia SIM card that I bought at a Tisak kiosk for €10.

I'm a happy customer of voip.ms, it costs me less than $1 per month for a US number. Their service has been very stable. They support REST API access and webhooks.

Does this work for 2-factor phone number authentication? Most such systems get flagged as VoIP and blocked or fail silently.

It works roughly 3/4th of the time for me. I've heard that you can increase your chances by buying a 'real' prepaid phone number on eBay for $10 or so, and then porting it over to a VoIP provider.

Not really the same solution but cheap (as low as $3 monthy in EU) to get a number, esim, a free pbx/many integrations and receive sms. You don't even need to put credits.

- Zadarma: <https://zadarma.com/en/tariffs/sms/>

Apple has had a similar feature with their "Hide my email" feature which I use everywhere. Many products that deal with passwords (Firefox, iCloud) already check the haveibeenpwned database on a regular basis to determine if passwords have leaked, hopefully we'll start to see a similar policy for other credentials that can be used to determine how easily you can correlate other pieces of information based on a small set of data points.

I wish they had a web version of it just like icloud private relay. They had something like this in the US called Firefox private network but they deprecated it in favor of their mullvad deal.

It's a shame because the mullvad deal is not interesting at all. Direct from mullvad it's the same price (cheaper if you pay monthly) and you have more features then through Firefox.

And it doesn't route every site through a different IP like Apple does. Something like that I would pay for but not this.

I wonder if they have any assurances that the phone numbers will 'work' as lots of VoIP/sip numbers are blocked by discord / google / basically everyone.

Edit: Looks like it's twilio on the backend. Not sure how many places will accept it.

It's gotten better but some websites, like the NPM registry, won't accept Relay emails even though the Firefox team has systems in place to prevent abuse.

There are other options for this where that's their primary product, Mozilla need to decide what they want to be, or at least fix the plethora of Firefox bugs before doing anything else (current one present after years: auto fill of android still shows up after being disabled, suggested logins...)

i bet that very quickly, sites that don't want anonymous emails will quickly block the mozmail.com domain, just like they block the mailinator domains.

(2021)

Anything new on here?

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251897

No prices, no technical details, just a "join the waitlist" button?

I see pricing, region locked?

According to the privacy policy, they are using Twilio for "receiv[ing] your phone number, your phone mask, and the phone numbers that you exchange phone calls and text messages with. Twilio also receives the content of text messages you send and receive".

Wonder how they are going to get around VoIP number blocking.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/

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