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I'm intrigued as to how you 'pronounced' that. Did you say "open parens" and "caret", and did they understand what you meant? Also, is having to divulge your password really the best way of verifying your account? Do they advise you to change your password immediately after going through this rigmarole?

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I would have rattled off something like "oh open paren sea cap why colon caret you equals" and so on. Honestly I have no idea if they parsed the sentence, or decided "gibberish from phone equals gibberish on screen .. good enough"

They didn't advise me to change my security question, no doubt because the name of my favorite childhood pet isn't likely to change.

Huh, never thought about it, but that's a pretty good argument against random security questions.

Another good argument is: having 5 passwords is not more secure than 1 really strong password.

I also think 2fa is ridiculous for 99% of applications. The widespread adoption we've seen is largely the result of developers trying to solve for user error, which as I stated in a previous comment is a waste of time and can never succeed (unless your goal is to find the flaws in your system).

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