Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork • Hacker News Board

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#71

Post by detaro » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #58

kevindqc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is something like that already. Look for "metered connections".

This is unfortunately not reliable. The only way to completely stop Windows 10 and certain other recent MS products from updating (for bandwidth cost or not-wanting-to-reboot-right-now reasons) is to not let the machine connect to the Internet at all which probably makes it useless for many situations. You could try running a server version of Windows instead, but you might find yourself unsupported in other ways (so…

In the Pro version you also can set it to "always ask before downloading updates", and that has worked reliably for me so far.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#72

Post by m0dest » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #35

pjc50 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you'd get a dedicated M2M MVNO operator who'll sell you a whole stack of them. If you just want one, you'll have to do a lot of price comparison; Three UK have some nice deals where you can use inclusive minutes/data in some non-EU countries as well as the standard EU free roaming.

Does anybody know of one that doesn't charge a monthly fee? I have a product idea where I'd like to use mobile data as a backup in case of wifi network failure. So I'm willing to pay a higher per-MB fee if I can avoid a monthly per-SIM fee.

unfortunately, no carrier will do this. I suspect that this is because of administrative fees associated with simply allocating a phone number and the network overhead from having a device associate with cell towers when idle.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#73

Post by TomMarius » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #69

jnbiche wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding, but you don't think that once word gets around some desperately poor region that tracker device == free phone calls, people aren't going to try and kill the bird to get the tracker? If you think that's not likely, you've got a lot more faith in humanity than I do.

Then they'll find that the Sim cards are locked and don't work, and will stop wasting their time on them.

Except that they mostly do work

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#74

Post by DC-3 » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

halflings wrote: post #51

isk517 wrote: post #46

In Sudan it is quite common for people to hunt storks in order to harvest their valuable SIM cards.

Got a link that confirms this? All I find online is this Polish story. If true, that would be pretty ironic (an ecologic charity making storks endangered by tracking them).

I'm pretty sure the parent comment was made in jest.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#75

Post by acobster » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

pndy wrote: post #67

It's kinda amusing I'm reading this "news" by help of HN on BBC News page. Still, it seems to be really not interesting (typical to "silly season" or as we're saying here in Poland "cucumber season") as no other media outlet has copied it - well, beside Super Express but that's just a tabloid newspaper of same level as British The Sun, and they love such - pardon the word, shit.

"Scientists rack up huge phone bill - your jaw will DROP when you learn why!"

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#76

Post by donretag » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #12

"EcoLogic told the Super Express newspaper that somebody found the tracker in Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their own phone, where they then racked up 20 hours' worth of phone calls" So they actually got a huge bill because they didn't set a SIM lock (if that's possible), and didn't block voice calls and so on. Presumably, they had a good contract for sending tiny packets of data, but not for roaming call…

One possibility is that the GPS tracker does not have a UI to unlock a SIM card, so the SIM card was set without a pin.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#77

Post by droopybuns » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #12

"EcoLogic told the Super Express newspaper that somebody found the tracker in Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their own phone, where they then racked up 20 hours' worth of phone calls" So they actually got a huge bill because they didn't set a SIM lock (if that's possible), and didn't block voice calls and so on. Presumably, they had a good contract for sending tiny packets of data, but not for roaming call…

Sim locking is a device-side control that ensures only a specific carrier’s sim is used in the device.

They should have used a limited IoT-oriented sim with data limits.

I kinda feel these folks were extraordinarily naive, but I’m coming from the perspective of a telco SME.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#78

Post by lstodd » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #69

jnbiche wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding, but you don't think that once word gets around some desperately poor region that tracker device == free phone calls, people aren't going to try and kill the bird to get the tracker? If you think that's not likely, you've got a lot more faith in humanity than I do.

Then they'll find that the Sim cards are locked and don't work, and will stop wasting their time on them.

Except that they won't stop - maybe the next bird will have a working sim.

Besides, it's not like every bird has a tracker. So how many birds one should kill to get a chance to check if the sim is working?

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#79

Post by braythwayt » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

isk517 wrote: post #46

In Sudan it is quite common for people to hunt storks in order to harvest their valuable SIM cards.

I know this is comment made in jest, but what it brought to mind was the movie "Interstellar," where the protagonist hunts drones in order to salvage their parts.

In America.

Re: Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork

#80

Post by dewey » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

droopybuns wrote: post #77

Symbiote wrote: post #12

"EcoLogic told the Super Express newspaper that somebody found the tracker in Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their own phone, where they then racked up 20 hours' worth of phone calls" So they actually got a huge bill because they didn't set a SIM lock (if that's possible), and didn't block voice calls and so on. Presumably, they had a good contract for sending tiny packets of data, but not for roaming call…

Sim locking is a device-side control that ensures only a specific carrier’s sim is used in the device. They should have used a limited IoT-oriented sim with data limits. I kinda feel these folks were extraordinarily naive, but I’m coming from the perspective of a telco SME.

I think they were talking about the SIM PIN code not the device locking.