Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, February 25th, 2025 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich.

And today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Quick diary from Jim today about an update to Ryan Benson's tool unfurl.

Unfurl at first sounds pretty straightforward and simple. It takes a URL,

takes it apart into its components. Now, that itself can be a little bit complex. URLs can come in

many forms and shapes, but unfurl goes beyond just sort of explaining, hey, this is the page, these are parameters.

It, for example, recognizes if part URL is a timestamp and then will convert it.

So really handy if you try to understand what the URL is all about.

The latest update fixes a couple bucks in the software,

but also adds support for blue sky URLs.

And according to an article in Forbes,

Google is moving away from SMS as a second factor

as an option for its Gmail service,

another similar Google services.

Now, Google, of course, has been pushing pass keys

and has sort of been pushing people away from SMS for a while,

but this push will not become stronger in the sense that SMS will no longer be supported at all,

or phone calls for that matter.

Another option that Google is offering is sort of an app-based authentication scheme

where you scan a QR code on the website using a phone that's already logged in to Google's services,

so that way you are confirming your account.

...