Yahoo!, Microsoft, and a grouch

[SemiSalt]

I have had a Yahoo email account for a long time. It's never been my primary email account. I think it just came along for free when I signed up to moderate a Yahoo!@ group. These days, I use it mostly for boat communications, mostly messages sent to my crew about dates and times, etc. So today, I fired up my laptop, opened Chrome, and clicked on the Yahoo! mail icon. And Yahoo told me to check my phone.

The detailed reasons/causes of why I got this instruction are too complicated to cover in detail. Really, I don't understand it in detail. But in generalities, here are some of the parts. Yahoo! had a major security breach. As a result, they decided to move all their email users to some form of multi-factor login. Mostly, I look at the Yahoo! mail in the Chrome browser on my Android (Samsung) tablet. They begged me for months to either switch to the new log in scheme, or to install and use the Yahoo! mail app, or both. I resisted, and, on the tablet, I can still just click on the icon and the mail opens. And that was also the case for the laptop until......

I had moved the laptop to Windows 10 when it was free. I did it mostly as an experiment before doing the same on our much more important desktop. At that time, I was still employed and I used the laptop when working at home. In the year and half since I stopped working, it has not been used much at all. I take care to keep it charged and turn it on once in a while just for auto-update purposes. A couple of months ago, the Windows 10 updates started failing. Eventually, I looked into why and deleted a few things that were causing conflicts, and yesterday, it did the install of a new version of Win 10 which apparently cleared out a lot settings including browser settings. So today, Yahoo! did not detect that I was a signed-in user, and made me start from scratch.

The phone/text sign-in does not work for me. I do not keep my cell phone on and in my pocket at home. Even if I did, It would be idiotic and annoying to have to get out my phone just to log in. I presume there are other methods of log-in, but I'm not sure that any of them would be more convenient for me.

It's easy to predict that Yahoo! will soon disappear, but I'm also wondering if the entire internet is doomed.

[Orestes Munn]

The Internet is, indeed, a giant pain in the ass. It's not going away, but it is transforming, like Penn Station in NYC, from a soaring, light-filled, architectural marvel, a symbol of optimism and faith in commerce, technology, and the fruits of republican government, to a dismal warren, peopled by bums, cops, and predators, through which you are doomed to pass if you want to get anywhere.

[kdh]

I'll bet the two-factor authentication will only be required for an initial login. I use Yahoo Mail too.

[BeauV]

Typically two-factor will only be forced if there is a “new” device that the vendor doesn’t think is secure.

I’d strongly suggest that ALL of your accounts be under two-factor control of some sort. On an iPhone you can get two-factor with the combination of a password and a fingerprint/faceprint, which is the easiest.

Frankly, two-factor evolved because of the idiotic passwords folks use. Typical passwords are “123456” and one’s birthday, and one’s dogs name etc.... Like any city, the Internet is both a wonder and a pain. For all the reasons we need good locks on doors and an alarm system, one needs protections in cities. If we all lived in a guarded ghetto of upper middle class folks, we wouldn’t need nearly as much security, but life would be terminally boring!

[Ajax]

The Internet is, indeed, a giant pain in the ass. It's not going away, but it is transforming, like Penn Station in NYC, from a soaring, light-filled, architectural marvel, a symbol of optimism and faith in commerce, technology, and the fruits of republican government, to a dismal warren, peopled by bums, cops, and predators, through which you are doomed to pass if you want to get anywhere.

That is a beautiful and apt comparison.