How much verification is too much?

from here

This is the precise problem I've been having with GMail. I enter the correct password and then GMail decides that's not good enough. Then they say they needs to verify me so they sends a code to my recovery email, and when I present the code back to them they decide that's not good enough either. Why attempt verification that way if you aren't going to accept the results? Anyway, now they want a cell phone number to send a code to, but I don't have a cell phone and even if I did I have little faith left that the result of that would be any different than the email verification.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of tweeting about the problem and as a result scammers have been sending me messages for days promising to help me get back into my account if I just contact them through Instagram or Whatsapp. I can recognize them for the scams they are, but not everyone would, so essentially Google's attempts to curb account take-overs are actually creating opportunities for account take-overs. 

It's a good thing politicians would never try to spam or scam us

from here and here

Leave it to the "Don't be evil" company to continue to find new ways to be evil. And yes, I know that politicians would in fact try to spam and scam us. The former president and grifter-in-chief already has scammed people by email under the ruse of fighting the election results.

As of writing, there's still time to voice your concerns to the FEC (by email it seems - ao@fec.gov)

Go hack yourself

found on someecards

Hacking yourself gives you experience in thinking like an attacker and can help you identify deficiencies in your defenses. Trying to guess your own password probably isn't the best way to do it, but I guess it's a start.

And stop changing the settings back to default all the time

from here

Supposedly you can change the authentication method to OAuth2, but that didn't seem to work properly for me and even if it had, I'm not sure how many authentication tokens it will keep separate (I'm using an email client because I have multiple accounts and I don't want them getting linked)

Demotivational security questions

found on Izismile

Another reason to lie on security questions is so that forgetting your password never forces you to examine how wrong your life turned out. That's not a helpful frame of mind when you're trying to recover your account.

What are you trying to say about me, Google?

from here

No, I'm not reminding myself to get bigger or last longer or transfer funds or anything like that. For all the smarts that goes into GMail, you'd think it could tell that an email I compose to myself while logged into the web interface would be enough to rule out the possibility of spam. Apparently that's not the case.