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Hi there! I thought it was just me. I do have a couple of older friends aged 70+ without mobiles, but that's all I knew of. :-)
hi! indeed, i don't know many other people without a cellphone, but it's not like I ask every time. there should be dozens of us, dozens. Do you know low tech magazine? https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
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Storytime: I bounce between Japan and Korea for work. I was in Seoul for about a year and a half and naturally had a Korean phone number. I used this number to sign up for Line (a popular chat service in the two countries), and I also linked my email address to the account. So when it was time to move back to Japan, I naturally canceled my Korean phone service. Fast forward 6 months, and my Line account suddenly disa…
Line is the worse violator of these principles. Last I used it, in order to install it on another device, you had to back up all that device's data (contacts, etc) to a computer, put your account on another device which then triggers a non negotiable wipe of the other device's data whenever it connects to the internet, then download the backup to your new device. Hell.
Had to create a new account.
The backing-up and restore is the easy part. Not much help if you can't move the account due to that silly phone number lock-in.
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You should have move your number to Japanese number though.
I do have a Japanese number. Perhaps you meant I should have linked my account to my number here? I'm sure there are things I could have done to prevent it from happening, but I had no reason to believe Line would simply delete my account, as it was linked to my email address. In fact, I only used the number for the initial registration. After that, I only used my email/password combo to log in.
As you, I only used the number for the initial registration - and I suspect that what's everybody do. I have no idea what the phone number should be used for outside of that. I'm not sure why Line (well, Naver, the company) does it that way. Others, including Skype (which would need the same level of 'verification') manage it better.
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No, as much as I hate Facebook: fuck phone numbers. The idea of using phone number as a personal identification tool is so bad, I'm struggling to believe this is not some kind of conspiracy designed for the solely purpose of mocking the user. It is bad enough that phone numbers exist at all in the eyes of the end user by the year 2019, 15 years after Skype with user-friendly logins appeared and when about a half of t…
Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.
I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…
Not even 20 years ago, before any number could be ported to mobiles, landlines in some (all?) Baby Bell regions had their prefix determined by geography. In other words, you could know what "zone" a given phone number was in by its prefix.
Take Silicon Valley. A (650) 960-xxxx number meant Mountain View. (408) 733-xxxx meant Sunnyvale. Etc.
Zones roughly respected cities, but boundary conditions abounded. If you lived near the Mountain View / Sunnyvale border, you could be in area code 415 (later 650) or 408.
San Jose had 3 zones. Cupertino was part of SJ1. Fremont / Newark were lumped and spanned 2 zones. Milpitas was part of SJ2. etc.
You were only guaranteed a local (non-toll) calling area of something like 8 miles, but Pac Bell would give you all of the zone overlap: if any part of your zone was within that 8 (?) miles of any part of your destination zone, it was a local (free) call. This meant your actual local range could extend 20+ miles.
I set up PC-based call broadcast systems (the vendor product I used was "BigmOth" for some membership organizations such that I could send a recorded message to whatever numbers in a given member roster. By placing two parallel systems in, say, Sunnyvale and SJ3, I could cover everywhere from Menlo Park to Los Gatos to Coyote to Fremont Newark zone 1 with no variable phone costs.
So, I set up a table in my database to join prefixes to zones, and my program went through the contacts and routed each destination number to the appropriate calling phone book (I rewrote the phone books after every batch of database updates). I had one system in my house, and a colleague had one in his in SJ3. I'd just uploaded his share of the phonebooks and the message recording binary to his ftp site, leaving him maybe 10 minutes of work for each cycle's setup.
Thus, I could blast 2-minute messages to members over a 200+ square mile area for free.
It was really slick. 10 years later, it was irrelevant, as everywhere became a free call.
* a SIM card holds only one phone number.
* if a SIM card holds multiple phone numbers, they are from the same country.
Programmers don't actually believe in such falsehoods, nor do they just decide to be lazy about implementation. In fact if anything programmers are generally more aware of such things. A better name for these lists would be "falsehoods businesses insist on despite their engineers warnings".
Yup. I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does. (Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of di…
> googlei18n > Some people do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked Well, you don't say! Next in the series, “Falsehoods programmers believe about 2fa, or: just use HOTP/TOTP, dammit.”
A challenge - try to register a Google account without providing personal information.
I got my first Google (at that time just "gmail") account back when you couldn't just register freely - you needed an "invite" from somebody who already had an account. At that time you didn't need to register any personal information. I did add a couple more accounts, mainly to keep high-volume mailing list registrations, and I still have one of those where there's still not any phone number registered.
Now it's different, I guess. And not in a better way.