Re: OT - Google accounts turning off less secure access

Requiring a so-called smart phone, brilliant, just to receive a 16 character password.

You don't need deep pockets for the cheaper smartphones or mobile plans.

A smart phone is an example. There are prolly other options for receiving the

No, it's the authetication code for 2-FA you get on your smartphone. The

It may be that you can opt to have an automatic phone call which speaks the code number. Generally, I agree with you. I must be the only person on creation who takes apps *off* his smart phone rather than putting them on. Mine has no mail, no Twitter, no WhatsApp, and so on. I'm working back to a thirty quid clamshell with PAYG. The rest is largely unnecessary s**te.

Yep. One of my tel nos for Gmail's 2SV is a landline number. The codes are read - at speed - by BT's voice synthesizer.

It doesn't need to be Smartphone. Just give a basic mobile number or your landline number and get the code as a text or read out by an automated voice.

I never got on with Turnpike - I used KA9Q when I was with Demon!

I think as an alternative, you can use codes printed on a sheet of paper for 2SV

I do have a "dumb" Nokia 1661 used twice a year as a long distance walkie-talkie, that the SIM has usually expired by the next time of use, but does receive text messages though, would that work for this purpose? or is there some sort of encrypt/decrypt process involved as well

I do have a "dumb" Nokia 1661 used twice a year as a long distance walkie-talkie, that the SIM has usually expired by the next time of use, so you reckon that is adequate for this gmail secondary app password access problem.

You're not using it to pick up mail. You're using it (once) to autheticate that you're allowed to log on to your gmail account to use webmail. Once you've put the app-specific password into your email client as per my note, it will once again pick up mail from gmail with no further action needed. IOW, you will have restored the status quo ante.

Along the I'd looked into USB security keys . If you believe in shop-local , no go. Argos,Currys, phone-shops don't stock them

Use a landline then - a BT robot will call you read text messages sent to it.

(but a cheap PAYG phone costs little and is handy to have)

Generally, though, it reads out sequences of numbers in an unintelligible way, or so I found.

Agreed, but not much use if you don't have a mobile signal.

I hate the 2FA which gives you a URL rather than a number: means you have to use a smart phone. The phone I use for text/voice is a Nokia feature phone, so I have to forward the message to a smart phone.

Yup, although they do seem to have improved they way they read the number it came from at least, which is a start.

I had one phone based auto text reader that tried to pronounce every number it saw in text. So you had to go through the mental gymnastics required to convert from "Three billion, seven hundred and two million, three hundred and forty three thousand, eight hundred and ninety two", to get the phone number 3702343892 and remember to stick a zero in front of it since it did not voice those.

(made up phone number, don't ring it!)

True. Although you can then run an authenticator app, and then not need to ability to receive a text in many cases.

This is not the USA where they had to institute a law ,1970s?, that all USA made films and TV dramas that referred to a phone number, had to have 555 inserted at the beginning. At the same time, enfoce all telcos to leave all the potential 555 numbers in each area code to be null

Well...