alt Hacker NewsYou can rent a virtual mobile number in your home country and consult SMSs on the web or even redirect them to email. I have done this for years, using Twilio for 2€ a month. Can't say the UX is great but it certainly fixes the whole problem.
I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Replies
Yeah, that's a good workaround. Google Voice can work too.
Unfortunately, more and more services are declining to send to VoIP numbers because of seCurItY, so it's a game of cat and mouse.
Fortunately SMS is so expensive in parts of Europe and it's not allowable anymore to use SMS by itself for online payment authentication, and both issues combined have slowly been pushing companies to explore alternatives.
There unfortunately seems to be no such pressure in the US. Passkeys could solve the issue, but probably increase support request volumes enough for most companies to not bother unless forced.
> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.