Allowing less secure apps - "Goozilla" vs Mozilla

[Tim]

On Mon, 2015-02-09 at 16:44 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I'm afraid my eyes also glazed over reading your very long post Tim,

I kind of did that on purpose, since pomo referrred me to a ridiculously
long thread and asked me to comment on it.  Hopefully his eyes ran out
of breath, too.  :-\

> but just to cherry-pick this specific point: Gmail 2FA allows you to
> print a list of 10 authentication codes for use in case you lose your
> phone or change the number (and of course changing the number just
> means registering the new one when logged in).

While that's good to know, my objections to things like that aren't just
about Google.  Other systems do some annoying authentication routines,
and it's going to be a real pain having to deal with yet more schemes,
each different.

> You can of course also lock your phone and disable it remotely. It may
> not be perfect but it's a long way better than any practical
> large-scale alternative anyone has thought of so far.

While I can set my simple phone to lock the keypad, that is a nuisance
I'd rather not do.  And I have no way to remote lock it.  I have a
barebones phone, not a smart phone.

A lot of these attempts at security make a number of presumptions about
people.  My objections are mostly technical.  The average internet user
just is not going to comprehend them, at all.  Mind you, though, they'll
probably just do everything through a web browser (email, IM, stalkbook,
I mean facebook), and be unaware that there was any other way of doing
it, and completely unaware that email is not hotmail or yahoo.

> There is no magic bullet for security.

I said something similar, in my huge post, too.

-- 
tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp

Linux 3.18.5-101.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Mon Feb 2 21:36:31 UTC 2015 i686

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying
to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.