Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.
Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.
That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.
This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.
In some countries you can get a new birrh certificate with your new name.
I would think that changing the last name only should be fine though, since up until somewhat recently, most women changed their last names when they got married, so most systems should be equipped to handle this.
It used to be very common for migrants to change their surnames, although less so now. There used to be a person who wrote about Scottish Lithuanians called John Millar, who was born as Jonas Stepšys. Noam Chomsky had said that his family's surname was substantially altered after they went to the USA.
And older example: Warner brothers were born as Wonsal (or Wonskolaser), and they changed their names too (Hirsz became Harry, Aaron became Albert).
There are tonnes of them. Especially Eastern Europeans and Jews. Italians sometimes too. Still happens in entertainment, since Steve Carell and Nicholas Cage's real names are more Italian sounding.
Hah. Cage changed his last name because he didn't want to be a "nepo-baby"... You should look up that Italian-sounding last name and see who it belongs to.
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I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.
The simplest solution is to change my phone number. But
a) why should I have to? it’s my number, dammit!
b) how many accounts have 2FA? if I changed my number, what if I miss updating one that’s important?
c) it could happen again
If I change my number, however, that is the simplest way to solve the problem. It’s just, do I want to?
>I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.
By taking advantage of Randy's business in a way that will send a message to Randy to let him sort it out.
Once had a client who though they were being clever using a competitors email domain in order to sent a signal of quality and fool prospective customers. The competitor who owned the domain just spun up the associated email addresses and then proceeded to login to all their services and delete them using password resets and email auth.
You used to see it a lot with hotlinking images back in the day, you'd ask a service to stop using a URL and they wouldn't. You then update the image to something offensive and the URL is suddenly removed from their site.
2FA over SMS is stupidly bad. It's worse than TOTP in every aspect including this reason. It is also much less secure. You could start switching accounts to TOTP regardless of this and then decide if you want to switch your number later when you have the option.
TOTP is portable and can be backed up.
I went a little bit off on a tangent, the stupidity of SMS 2FA is a pet peeve of mine.
If I lose my phone I have no totp access or sms access
I walk to the local phone shop and get a replacement sim for my number with a few of bits of ID and I regain sms access. Totp access is gone forever.
It’s clearly not worse that totp in every way.
We managed to get given a drug dealer's former landline, and had to get it changed after strange calls in the middle of the night. Then our neighbours got the same number after about a year and had the same issue.
Its not always possible, some countries make it pretty hard to do a change of name
No, the best thing to do is get the press involved and make Apple and ideally the US gov fix their incompetent handling of this.
Given a US senator was "on" the post-9/11 no-fly list for the same stupid reason, merely making noise and getting the press invlolved isn't enough to fix the deeper problem.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-kennedys-airport-adventure/
What name do you suggest they choose, "Roger Thornhill" perhaps?