[Discuss] bios upgrade appears to have broken access to my google account and gmail

[Barbara Ellen Irwin]

(This is Alan, and I am using Barbara's access to the vlug discuss
list (which she kindly shared with me) rather than my own because I
currently cannot access email that accumulates in my gmail account.)

The necessary background information for this issue is today I took
our principal computer into MotherComputers for a long-overdue BIOS
upgrade (that with some luck might finally solve the AMD Ryzen 7 1700
linux kernel lockups I have discussed before and which with "random"
uptimes between lockups ranging from 0.5 days to 24 days with the mean
roughly 8 days or so.)

Although it is way too soon to say much about stability other than the
system is still up after 0.3 days or so, this "new BIOS" system passed
all my immediate tests except for one simple thing.  Which is I cannot
access my email stored in my gmail account!

For example, access to gmail is controlled via a google account login,
but that login prompt no longer works for me.  Instead, I get diverted
to "This device isn't recognised. For your security, Google wants to
make sure that it's really you. Learn more."

So unless there is some huge coincidence going on, google somehow got
access to my previous BIOS version and feels I am now trying
to log in from a different device (which is technically correct, but I
assume most users would like to access their google account from
anywhere rather than be limited to just one device with a fixed BIOS version.

Google documentation does claim that you can use a firefox private
page to login from some non-standard location, but so far that option
has not worked for me either.

And specifying a separate non-gmail account to recieve verification
numbers does not work either.  The message in that case is

Thanks for confirming that you can access
the [alternative] contact email address that you provided.  Unfortunately, Google
couldn't verify that alan.w.irwin1234 at gmail.com belongs to you. Learn
more about how to recover your account.

Has anybody every run into this situation of being shut out of their
google account whenever they try to access it from a different
computer (e.g., new computer or new bios)?  If so, how did you manage
to recover access to your account?

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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