You may recall my previous post about Apple’s two-step verification and how I reluctantly disabled it for a long trip outside the US. Now I find out that the government of Australia came to the same conclusion. Only one of us seems to be troubled by it, however.
I’m not going to get into any conspiracy theories about why the Australian government might wish to discourage the use of better authentication methods. If they wanted to get into someone’s government services account, I presume they have other ways to do it than hope they can guess at their lousy password.
But putting out the suggestion that two factor auth is something maybe not so important? There’s the real offense. “Go ahead and enjoy your holiday, don’t bother your pretty little head about that complicated security thing.”
Yes, the problems of handling two factor auth when swapping SIMs are a concern. A concern for the people who design these systems that are complex and cumbersome to use and seem to forget that real people don’t conveniently stay put all the time. But how about we talk about that instead of discouraging people from using them?
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