21–30 of 39 posts
If you want a stable phone number, use Google Voice (or another VOIP equivalent). When I travel to Europe/Asia, I just buy a local SIM and use Google Hangouts to make and receive calls over IP. I treat my cell phone numbers as disposable, and indeed,I've been through 4 different prepaid carriers in the past few years, but none of my friends and family noticed any change since they all call via my GV number. (well, in…
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How does that work for all the services that refuse to accept VoIP numbers nowadays? Don't they still need your cell phone number, which keeps changing?
I ported my cellular number to GV a few years ago and haven't had it refused by any service that needs a phone number.
If you want a stable phone number, use Google Voice (or another VOIP equivalent). When I travel to Europe/Asia, I just buy a local SIM and use Google Hangouts to make and receive calls over IP. I treat my cell phone numbers as disposable, and indeed,I've been through 4 different prepaid carriers in the past few years, but none of my friends and family noticed any change since they all call via my GV number. (well, in…
What other VOIP equivalents are there for those of us who don't live in the US?
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I ported my cellular number to GV a few years ago and haven't had it refused by any service that needs a phone number.
Hm, I've definitely seen a lot. First one that comes to my mind is Telegram [1], but it's not one I use personally. I've run across it before personally too, but I'm forgetting for what services... [1] http://telegram.wiki/troubleshooting:ri
"Oh CDMA proves you don't need a SIM card" - the stupidity HURTS
Given his difficulty in "buying a SIM card" (which I've done in several countries and it was never as difficult as portrayed) I can see why
- SIM cards makes switching telcos EASIER as CDMA phones need the company to issue an UIMID before you can do anything with it (while SIM cards talk to the company and do that - they're tiny computers) - oh and btw newer CDMA modules are moving to SIM cards
- SIM cards are safer, as initial CDMA systems that fell back to AMPS were vulnerable to cloning
"I wouldn’t have to go to a shop to buy SIM card and I wouldn’t have to go back to the same shop to top-up my SIM card."
And that's why a lot of stores sell (or you know, they just give you) SIM cards and an even bigger amount of stores have top-ups available.
And of course the "proposed solution" relies on login/password which is such a bad taste joke I don't even find funny. A SIM card is a hardware crypto auth module, if there's one thing that deserves to be called "stupid technology of the past century" are usernames and passwords.
Sure, phone numbers are old. It's an old standard that has a big backwards compatibility requirement.
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Hm, I've definitely seen a lot. First one that comes to my mind is Telegram [1], but it's not one I use personally. I've run across it before personally too, but I'm forgetting for what services... [1] http://telegram.wiki/troubleshooting:ri
GroupMe is another example that doesn't work.
I have a very old GV number (at least 7 years old), so maybe not all numbers are flagged as VOIP.
Now imagine crossing the border, connecting to a new telco and being prompted to choose a data plan (or a phone number). This would be great! I’d purchase new phone number / data plan every time I’d cross the border. Telcos would profit from this and I wouldn’t have to spend time researching the best package (I will be presented with the options right in the popup on my phone) The author has a very optimistic view of…
Actually, European roaming is incredibly reasonable, and set to get even better.
Since July 2014 roaming charges were set to EUR 0.05 per minute, and since April this year that was changed to a cap, with prices varying from the domestic rate to EUR 0.05 maximum. And the legislation [0] requires the telcos to make changes again next year in 2017, that will make roaming charges equivalent to domestic charges, i.e. abolishing them. Similar rules apply to data rates - between domestic rate and EUR 0.05 per MiB just now and no extra charge above domestic in 2017.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming-tariff...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164#DNS_mapping_of_E.164_num...
I agree with the author on a few points: 1. the telephone number system is terrible (but only in hindsight) 2. a telephone number should not be used for security But his premise of a DNS for phone numbers is ridiculous. Does he think the PSTN was invented when smartphones came out? What about the wide plethora of legacy phones that would cause countless issues? If someone did manage to complete he herculean (if not i…
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IP addresses have nothing to do with identification. As the name implies, they're for addressing.
My point is that, with cryptography, they are redundant. If all traffic on the internet is encrypted, why do I need to both encrypt a packet such that only a single recipient can read it and specify an address? Any node on the path to the recipient could do a lookup and find Google's IP address, the client doesn't really need to.
Certainly, networks can work without any delegation in this form; tor's hidden services show that this can work in practice. Pretty slow though. Reasonable performance (and accuracy) depends on not having every node on every network know the correct route to every other node, or having nodes have to reach a consensus (slow) on where to forward your packet at each hop. What's your plan for that?