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Comment by zhivota | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.

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That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.

This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.

I would think that changing the last name only should be fine though, since up until somewhat recently, most women changed their last names when they got married, so most systems should be equipped to handle this.

You would think. But that's not always the case: Florida residents face driver’s license denials over mismatched documents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FSwv_D8gxw (Now, it's Florida, which may partly explain the idiocracy.)

It used to be very common for migrants to change their surnames, although less so now. There used to be a person who wrote about Scottish Lithuanians called John Millar, who was born as Jonas Stepšys. Noam Chomsky had said that his family's surname was substantially altered after they went to the USA.

And older example: Warner brothers were born as Wonsal (or Wonskolaser), and they changed their names too (Hirsz became Harry, Aaron became Albert).

There are tonnes of them. Especially Eastern Europeans and Jews. Italians sometimes too. Still happens in entertainment, since Steve Carell and Nicholas Cage's real names are more Italian sounding.

Hah. Cage changed his last name because he didn't want to be a "nepo-baby"... You should look up that Italian-sounding last name and see who it belongs to.

I know who he's related to, but he did go for a very un-Italian name.

In some countries you can get a new birrh certificate with your new name.

I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.

The simplest solution is to change my phone number. But

a) why should I have to? it’s my number, dammit!

b) how many accounts have 2FA? if I changed my number, what if I miss updating one that’s important?

c) it could happen again

If I change my number, however, that is the simplest way to solve the problem. It’s just, do I want to?

2FA over SMS is stupidly bad. It's worse than TOTP in every aspect including this reason. It is also much less secure. You could start switching accounts to TOTP regardless of this and then decide if you want to switch your number later when you have the option.

TOTP is portable and can be backed up.

I went a little bit off on a tangent, the stupidity of SMS 2FA is a pet peeve of mine.

If I lose my phone I have no totp access or sms access

I walk to the local phone shop and get a replacement sim for my number with a few of bits of ID and I regain sms access. Totp access is gone forever.

It’s clearly not worse that totp in every way.

Only if you don't backup your TOTP tokens. Just like you lose your photos when you lose your phone. One of the main advantages of TOTP is that it is portable and can be backed up.

> I walk to the local phone shop and get a replacement sim for my number with a few of bits of ID and I regain sms access.

Or someone else gets access to your SIM by sim swapping you, which is not as stupidly easy as it used to be, but still SMS remains insecure. Building an authentication system on it is just a bad idea from virtually every angle.

I suggest exporting your password manager && your topt keychain onto an encrypted flash drive. I went through the horrors of having a phone die on me after migrating my topt to a local solution. Having a valid login cookie on bitwarden on my laptop was the only thing that saved me.

And that post is why sms is superior.

You vans I may be able to manage a backup and understand how these codes are generated. The average person does not.

From memory most totp apps don’t even migrate when you move from one phone to another - at least on iPhone. I haven’t done that for 5 years but I seem to remember having to create new entries.

I've moved between three managers in the past two years and all of them supported importing and exporting your full lists. That could be a recent development, though. I admit, I haven't used an apple product in a long time, so you could be right. I don't trust SMS, because I don't trust cleartext over the air. Too many people have too much time on their hands and information is too readily available.

I agree but there are so many places that demand only SMS 2FA

We managed to get given a drug dealer's former landline, and had to get it changed after strange calls in the middle of the night. Then our neighbours got the same number after about a year and had the same issue.

No, the best thing to do is get the press involved and make Apple and ideally the US gov fix their incompetent handling of this.

Given a US senator was "on" the post-9/11 no-fly list for the same stupid reason, merely making noise and getting the press invlolved isn't enough to fix the deeper problem.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-kennedys-airport-adventure/

Well, until they decide that a name change is inherently suspicious under these circumstances, and things get even worse.

In Ireland you can use the Gaelic spelling and probably get away with it. Poof, no matches for Seán Ó Beirn.

Its not always possible, some countries make it pretty hard to do a change of name

What name do you suggest they choose, "Roger Thornhill" perhaps?

Tim Cook should do, or Donald Trump, either one should get you removed from the list quickly

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