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Vijay P

Personal blog · tech.vijayp.casecuritysystems

Vijay P's personal blog at tech.vijayp.ca covers security and systems. Since 2016, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times, most often “Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.

Visit the blog
4mentions?
3HN people?
2016–2020first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 2 in 2016

Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?

Why HN links it

HN readers link Vijay P's posts on SMS-based 2FA weaknesses, including how Google account recovery depends on backup phone numbers, and a write-up on hunting a Linux kernel bug.

Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-20

What Hacker News says?

  1. scottmcdot · 2020-01-13Recommends
    This post [1] makes a very good point... Using a few old Google accounts, I experimented with Google’s account recovery options and discovered that if a Google account does not have a backup phone number associated with it, Google requires you to have access to the recovery email account OR know the security questions in order to take over an account. However, if a backup phone number is on the account, Google allow…

    Comment linking /adding-a-phone-number-to-your-google-account-can-make-it-less-secure-f1cc7280ff6a

    on “SMS is not 2FA-secure”
  2. Submitted Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure as a story · 593 points

    HN discussion
  3. vijayp · 2020-04-29Recommends
    Congrats to the team for tracking this down, it was a great write-up! Twitter has some great networking/kernel engineers. When I was working at Twitter a few years back we isolated and fixed another insidious kernel bug; a large group was critical to making it happen (including Cong, who worked on this bug): https://tech.vijayp.ca/linux-kernel-bug-delivers-corrupt-tcp... I'm always shocked at how the kernel seems to…

    Comment linking /linux-kernel-bug-delivers-corrupt-tcp-ip-data-to-mesos-kubernetes-docker-containers-4986f88f7a19?gi=ef00c52ee0c2

    on “Hunting a Linux kernel bug”
  4. Submitted Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it LESS secure as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion

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